Hogarth became useful to Sir James Thornhill. This last, a worthy, somewhat pompous, but industrious magnifico of the moment, a Covent Garden Caravaggio and cross between Raphael Mengs and the Groom-porter, had wit enough to discern the young designer and graver’s capacity, and condescended to patronize him. There is reason to believe that he employed William to assist in the production of his roomy works. When ceilings and domes were to be painted at two guineas the Flemish ell, it is not likely that Royal Sergeant painters and knights of the shire for Melcombe Regis could afford or would vouchsafe to cover with pigments and with their own courtly hands the whole of the required area. The vulgar, of course, imagined that the painter did all; that Thornhill lay for ever stretched on a mattress, swinging in a basket three hundred feet high in the empyrean of Wren’s dome, daubing away at his immense Peters and Pauls, or else stepping backwards to the edge of a crazy platform to contemplate the work he had done, and being within an ace of toppling over to inevitable crash of death beneath, when an astute colour-grinder saved his beloved master by flinging a brush at Paul’s great toe—cruel to be kind, and so causing the artist, in indignant apprehension of injury to his beloved saint, to rush forward, saving his own life and the toe likewise. A pretty parallel to this story is in that of the little boy in the Greek epigram who has crawled to the very edge of a precipice, and is attracted from his danger by the sight of his mother’s breast. A neat little anecdote, but—it is somewhat musty. It is a myth, I fear. The vulgar love such terse traditions. Zeuxis refusing to sell his pictures, because no sum of money was sufficient to buy them, and imitating fruit so nicely that the birds came and pecked at it; Parrhasius cozening Zeuxis into the belief that his simulated curtain was real, and crucifying a bondman (the wretch!) that he might transfer his contortions to canvas; Apelles inducing a horse to neigh in recognition of the steed he had drawn; Amurath teaching a French painter how properly to design the contracted muscles of the neck when the head is severed from the body by causing a slave to be decapitated in his presence: Correggio receiving the price of his master-work in farthings, or some vile copper Italian coinage, and dying under the weight of the sack in which he was carrying the sordid wage home; Cimabue ruddling the fleeces of his lambs with saintly triptichs, and the late Mr. Fuseli eating raw pork-chops for supper in order to design the “Nightmare,” more to the life: all these are _ben trovati_,—_ma non son veri_, I suspect.