With the daughter of this grandee of easeldom, this favourite of monarchs, this Greenwich and Hampton Court Velasquez, William Hogarth, painter, engraver, and philosopher, but as yet penniless, had the inconceivable impudence not only to fall in love, but to run away. I rather think that Lady Thornhill connived at the surreptitious courtship, and was not inexorably angry when the stolen match took place; but as for the knight, he would very probably just as soon have thought of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo and Virorum coming down from an allegorical staircase, and dancing a saraband to the tune of “Green Sleeves” on the north side of Covent Garden Piazza, as of his young _protégé_ and humble friend Willy Hogarth presuming to court or to marry his daughter. Oh! it is terrible to think of this rich man, this father of a disobedient Dinah, walking his studio all round, vowing vengeance against that rascally Villikins, and declaring that of his large fortune she shan’t reap the benefit of one single pin! Oh! cruel “parient,” outraged papa, Lear of genteel life! He frets, he fumes, he dashes his wig to the ground. He remembers him, perchance, of sundry small moneys he has lent to Hogarth, and vows he will have him laid by the heels in a spunging-house ere the day be out. Send for a capias, send for a mittimus! Send for the foot-guards, the tipstaves, and the train-bands, for Jane Thornhill has levanted with William Hogarth! They were married at old Paddington Church on the 23rd of March, 1729. Thus runs the parish register: “William Hogarth, Esq. and Jane Thornhill, of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden.” Marriage and hanging go together they say, and William and Jane went by Tyburn to have _their_ noose adjusted. In the _Historical Chronicle_ for 1729, the bridegroom is described as “an eminent designer and engraver;” but in Hogarth’s own family Bible, a worn, squat, red-ink-interlined little volume, printed early in the reign of Charles the First, and now reverentially preserved by Mr. Graves, the eminent print-publisher of Pall Mall, there is a certain flyleaf, which I have seen, and which to me is of infinitely greater value than Historical Chronicle or Paddington Parish Register, for there, in the painter’s own handwriting, I read—“W. Hogarth married Sir James Thornhill’s daughter, March 23rd, 1729.”