Between 1727 and 1730, Hogarth appears to have painted dozens of single portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies.” In the list he himself scheduled are to be noticed “four figures for Mr. Wood” (1728); “six figures for Mr. Cock” (1728); “an assembly of twenty-five figures for my Lord Castlemaine” (1729); “five for the Duke of Montagu;” nine for Mr. Vernon, four for Mr. Wood, and so forth. The prices paid for “Assemblies” appear to have fluctuated between ten and thirty guineas. The oddest, and nearly the earliest commission he received for a portrait was in 1726, when several of the eminent surgeons of the day subscribed their guinea a-piece for him to compose a burlesque “conversation” of Mary Tofts, the infamous rabbit-breeding impostor of Godalming; and St. André, chirurgeon to the King’s household, a highly successful and most impudent quack, who had made himself very busy in the scandalous hoax, and pretended to believe in Tofts. For the story that Hogarth made a drawing of Jack Sheppard in Newgate (1724), at the time when Sir James painted the robber’s half-length in oils—the imaginary scene is admirably etched by George Cruikshank in one of his illustrations to Mr. Ainsworth’s strange novel—there does not seem any foundation. W. H. certainly painted Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, in her cell, in 1733; and from that well-known and authenticated fact some persons may have jumped at the conclusion that he was limner in ordinary to the Old Bailey. I dwelt persistently in the preceding section of these essays upon the scenes and characters, the vices and follies, the humours and eccentricities, the beauties and uglinesses, that Hogarth must have seen in his young manhood, and asked and thought about, and which must have sunk into his mind and taken root there. Satirists can owe but little to inspiration. They can move the world with the lever of wit, but they must have a fulcrum of fact. Their philosophy is properly of the inductive order. Without facts, facts to reason upon, their arguments would be tedious and pointless. Wherein lies the force or direction of satirizing that Chinese mandarin whom you never saw—that Zulu Kaffir who never came out of his kraal but once, and then to steal a cow? It was Hogarth’s faculty to catch the manners living as they rose; it was his province to watch their rising, and to walk abroad, an early bird, to pick up the worms of knavery and vice, to range the ample field, and see what the open and what the covert yielded. From twenty to thirty the social philosopher must OBSERVE. If he grovel in the mud even, he must observe and take stock of the humane passer-by who stoops to pick him up. After thirty he had better go into his study, turn on his lamp, and turn out the contents of his mind’s commonplace book upon paper. This is the only valid excuse for what is termed, after a Frenchman’s Quartier-Latin-argot phrase “Bohemianism:” the only excuse for Fielding’s Covent Garden