Head Club, and the hideous practical joke played off by Pope on Curll. Educated men seemed to share in those days the yearning of the French actress—the _besoin de s’encanailler_—the desire to disport themselves in a pigsty, more or less Epicurean; and but for the knowledge of this prevalent low tone in cultivated society it is difficult to realize the fact of Hogarth going back to his lady wife, and Thornhill to the powdered and bewigged grandee, his papa. Forrest’s narrative of the tour, which began, as I have said, on the twenty-seventh, and finished on the thirty-first of May, is far too elaborate for me to give anything beyond a very brief reflex of it here. I will quote, however, the opening lines:— “’Twas first of morn on Saturday The seven and twentieth of May, When Hogarth, Thornhill, Tothall, Scott, And Forrest, who this journal wrote, From Covent Garden took departure, To see the world by land and water.” It appears that their hearts were light, and those nether garments, now fallen almost into desuetude, save among grooms, footmen, blackrods, and members of the diplomatic service, were thin. They started, singing after a carouse, during the small hours of the morning, and went down the river to Billingsgate. At the noted “Dark-house” they met the same sort of company as Mr. Edward Ward introduces us to in the _London Spy_, and Hogarth took a portrait, unfortunately not preserved, of a waterside humorist, known as the “Duke of Puddledock.” “Of Puddledock a porter grim, Whose portrait Hogarth in a whim Presented him in caricature, He pasted on the cellar door.” Thence they went to Gravesend in the tilt-boat with a “mackrel gale,” chanting lustily, and regaling on “biscuit, beef, and gin.” At Gravesend they put up at “Mrs. Bramble’s.” They had previously seen at Purfleet three men-of-war, the Dursley Galley, the Gibraltar, and the Tartar Pink, the pilot of which last vessel begged them to “lend him a cast.” Thence they walked to Rochester, and saw in the cathedral “th’ unknown person’s monument.” _Pendente lite_, they drank six pots of ale. They saw “Watt’s Charity,” and eulogized its hospitality, remarking only “But the contagiously affected, And rogues and proctors are rejected,” marvelling much as to the origin of the distaste conceived by Master Watts against “proctors.” For dinner at the Crown at Strood they had “soles and flounders, with crab sauce;” a stuffed and roasted calf’s head “with purt’nance minced and liver fried;” and by way of a second course, roast leg of mutton and green peas. Peas were early, alas! in May, ’32. “The cook was much commended for’t, Fresh was the beer, and sound the port.”