[11] Dr. Misaubin lived at 96, St. Martin’s lane. Of his staircase, painted by Clermont, the Frenchman, I have already spoken. Those were the days when “Mrs. Powell, the colourman’s mother, used to make a pipe of wine every year from the vines that grew in the garden in St Martin’s Lane.” Traces of its old rurality may also be found in the name of one of its noisomest offshoots—the “Hop Gardens.” Dr. Misaubin “flourished” in 1732. He was not a Frenchman born, but of French Huguenot extraction. He was an arrant and impudent quack, but a good-natured man, and dispensed the huge fortune he amassed liberally enough. More anent him when he grows older and more wrinkled, in the _Marriage à la Mode_. All this man’s gold, however, turned in the end to dry leaves. His grandson, Angiband, dissipated the pill and nostrum fortune, and died of Geneva-on-the-brain in St. Martin’s Workhouse. Engraver Smith (J. T.) says that Misaunbin’s father was a Protestant clergyman, and mentions a “family picture” representing the Doctor in all his glory, with his son on his knees, and his reverend papa at a table behind, and arrayed in full canonicals. [12] Everybody seems to have had Latin verses, eulogistic or abusive, addressed to him in those days. Thus the “Sapphics” of Mr. Loveling, a young gentleman of the university, to the rigorous Middlesex Justice:— “Pellicum, Gonsone, animosus hostis, Per minus castus Druriæ tabernas Lenis incedens, abeas Diones Æquus Alumnis!” And so forth. [13] He sat for Melcombe Regis in the two last parliaments of George the First. The borough was then a mere pocket one, in the gift of the backstairs. Thornhill’s “employments” were continued to him for some time by George the Second; but, like his predecessor, Sir Christopher Wren, he was removed to make way for place-men who, without any very high attainments, could be useful to the Ministry. Thenceforth, the “goodman” amused himself by painting easel-pictures. He was taken for death in an access of gout, and died in his chair on the 4th of May, and was buried at Stalbridge on the 13th. He had greatly beautified the ancestral mansion and estate, and had erected, on an adjacent hill, an obelisk to the memory of George the First, which was visible to all the country side. Hogarth himself records the death of his father-in-law, in Sylvanus Urban’s obituary in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_—then a very young publication, indeed. He says that he was “the greatest history painter this age has seen;” and states, that as king’s sergeant painter he had to decorate all his majesty’s coaches, barges, and “the royal navy.” Are we to understand from this that Thornhill was expected to carve and gild the figure heads of three-deckers!