Papa-in-law was in a fury, set his face and wig against the young couple, would not see them, would not give them any money, cast them out of the grand piazza mansion to starve, if they so chose, among the cabbage-stumps of the adjacent market. It behoved William to work hard. I don’t think he ever resided with his wife in Cranbourn Alley. He had given that messuage up to his sisters. What agonies the member for Melcombe Regis, the scion of Henry the Third’s Thornhills, must have endured at the thought of that abhorred “old frock-shop!” There is reason to believe that for some time previous to his marriage Hogarth had resided in Thornhill’s own house, and had so found opportunities for his courtship of the knight’s daughter. Of young Thornhill, Sir James’s son, he was the intimate friend and comrade. Where he spent his honeymoon is doubtful; but it was either in 1729 or 1730 that he began to take lodgings at South Lambeth, and to form the acquaintance of Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the lessee of Vauxhall Gardens. In the tranquillity and sobriety of a happy married life, Hogarth began for the first time deeply to philosophize. He had eaten his cake. He had sown his wild-oats. He was to beat the town no more in mere indifference of carousal; he was to pluck the moralist’s flower from the strange wild nettles he had handled. In this age have been found critics stupid and malevolent enough to accuse every author who writes with a purpose, and who endeavours to draw attention to social vices, of imposture and of hypocrisy. He should be content, these critics hold, to describe the things he sees; he is a humbug if he moralize upon them. It is not unlikely that the vicious Fribbles of Hogarth’s time held similar opinions, and took Hogarth to be a reckless painter of riotous scenes, and who just infused sufficient morality into them “to make the thing go off.” It was otherwise with him I hope and believe. I am firmly convinced that the sin and shame of the evils he depicted were as deeply as they were vividly impressed on Hogarth’s mind—that he was as zealous as any subscriber to a Refuge, a Reformatory, or a Home can be now, to abate a dreadful social evil; that his hatred for the wickedness of dissolute men, his sympathy for women fallen and betrayed; his utter loathing for those wretched scandals to their sex, the women whose trade it is to decoy women, was intense and sincere. I do _not_ believe in the sincerity of Fielding, who could grin and chuckle over the orgies of the Hundreds of Drury and the humours of the bagnio. I find even the gentle and pure-minded Addison simpering in the _Freeholder_ about certain frequenters of Somerset House masquerades. But Hogarth’s satire in the _Harlot’s Progress_ never makes you laugh. It makes you rather shudder and stagger, and turn pale. The six pictures which form this tragedy were painted immediately after his marriage. They were painted in the presence