The earliest known picture of William Hogarth is one called the _Wanstead Assembly_, long, and by a ridiculous blunder, corrupted into “Wandsworth.” The term “Assembly” was a little bit of art-slang. A portrait being a portrait, and a “conversation” a group of persons generally belonging to one family; by an “assembly” was understood a kind of pictorial rent-roll, or domestic “achievement,” representing the lord, or the squire, the ladies and children, the secretaries, chaplains, pensioned poets, led-captains, body-flatterers, hangers-on, needy clients, lick-trenchers, and scrape-plates, the governesses and tutors, the tenants, the lacqueys, the black-boys, the monkeys, and the lapdogs: _tutta la baracca_, in fact. In the _Wanstead Assembly_ was a portrait of the first Earl Tylney, and many of his vassals and dependants; and shortly after the completion of the picture, Mitchell, for whose opera of _The Highland Clans_ Hogarth designed a frontispiece, complimented the artist on his performance in smooth couplets:— “Large families obey your hand, Assemblies rise at your command.” It was William’s frequent fortune during life to be much celebrated in verse. Swift, you know, apostrophized him as “hum’rous Hogart;” Mitchell, as we have seen, lauds his “families” and “assemblies.” Shortly afterwards, the tender and graceful Vincent Bourne, who wrote the _Jackdaw_, and whose innocent memory as “Vinny Bourne” is yet cherished in Westminster School, where he was junior master, addressed the painter in Latin “hendecasyllables.” Hoadley, chancellor and bishop, spurred a clumsy Pegasus to paraphrase his pictures in verse. Churchill, when he was old, tried to stab him with an epistle; David Garrick and Samuel Johnson competed for the honour of writing his epitaph.