We would paint our pictures and our progresses in 1730-1-2-3. We were gaining fame. The Lords of the Treasury, as related by old under-Secretary Christopher Tilson, could examine and laugh over our plates even at the august council board, in the cockpit, and, adjourning, forthwith proceed to purchase impressions at Bakewell’s shop, near Johnson’s Court, in Fleet Street. “Frances Lady Byron”—more of her lord hereafter—was sitting to us for her portrait. Theophilus Cibber had pantomimised us. “Joseph Gay”—the wretched pseudonym of some Grub Street, gutter-blood rag-galloper—had parodied in “creaking couplets” the picture-poem of _Kate Hackabout_.[15] Vinny Bourne had headed his “hendecasyllables,” _ad Gulielmum Hogarth_ Παραινετικον. Somerville, author of the _Chase_ had dedicated his _Hobbinol_ to us; we were son-in-law to a knight and M.P., but we were not yet quite emancipated from struggles, and hardship and poverty. As yet we were very badly paid, and our small earnings were gnawed away by the villanous pirates soon to succumb to the protective act of Parliament which Huggins was to draw—how strangely and frequently that detested name turns up—and draw not too efficiently on the model of the old literary copyright statute of Queen Anne. Morris had paid us the thirty pounds adjudged for the _Element of Earth_: but no munificent, eccentric old maid had as yet arisen to gratify us with sixty guineas for a single comic design: _Taste in High Life_. We were poor, albeit not lowly. The wolf was not exactly at the door. He didn’t howl from morning to night; but, half-tamed, he built himself a kennel in the porch, and snarled sometimes over the threshold. Let it be told again that we, William, were “a punctual paymaster.” So it behoved us to paint as many portraits and conversations as we could get commissions for, and do an occasional stroke of work on copper-plate for the booksellers. Coypel and Vandergucht, both approved high Dutch draughtsmen of the time, shared the patronage of the better class of booksellers with us; but none of us worked for the polecat Edmund Curll.