Fresh from perusing the domestic records of the eighteenth century, you have a confused mental picture of artists poor in pocket but rich in genius, pervading the country, hoofing it muzzily along the roads, and boozing in every village ale-house. You see such an one, penniless, offering to settle a trivial score by painting a new sign or retouching an old one, and you very vividly picture mine host ungraciously accepting the offer, because he has no choice. Then, behold, the artist goes his way, like the Prodigal Son, to his husks and his harlots, to run up more scores and liquidate them in the like manner; and presently there enters, to your mental vision, a traveller whose educated eye perceives that sign, and discovers in its yet undried and tacky oils the touch of a master. He buys that masterpiece for golden guineas from the gaping and unappreciative innkeeper, whose score was but a matter of silver shillings; and he--he is a Duke or something in the Personage way--takes that “Barley Mow” or “Ship and Seven Stars,” or whatever the subject may be, tenderly home to his palace and places it, suitably framed, among his ancestral Titians, Raphaels, or Botticellis. That, I say, is the golden, misty picture of Romance presented to you, and, in sober fact, incidents of that nature were not unknown; but that they happened quite so often as irresponsible weavers of legends would have us believe, we may take leave to doubt. Artists of established repute sometimes, even then, painted inn-signs from other motives. Hogarth, for example, that stern pictorial moralist, was scarcely the man to be reduced to such straits as those already hinted; but he was a jovial fellow, and is said to have painted a number of signs for friendly innkeepers. The classic example of those attributed to him is, of course, the well-known sign of the “Man Loaded with Mischief,” the name of a public-house, formerly 414, Oxford Street.[6] The name was changed, about 1880, to the “Primrose,” and the painted panel-sign removed. In its last years it--whether the original or an old copy seems uncertain--was fixed against the wall of the entrance-lobby. The picture was one of crowded detail. The Man, another Atlas, carried on his back a drunken woman holding a glass of gin in her hand, and had on either shoulder a monkey and a jackdaw. In the background were “S. Gripe’s” pawnshop, the “Cuckold’s Fortune” public-house, crowned with a pair of horns, two quarrelling cats, a sleeping sow, and a jug labelled “Fine Purl.” This scathing satire, peculiarly out of place in a drink-shop, was “Drawn by Experience” and “Engraved by Sorrow,” and was finished off by the rhyme: A Monkey, a Magpie, and a Wife Is the true Emblem of Strife. A somewhat similar sign exists at the present time at Madingley, near Cambridge. [Illustration: THE “MAN LOADED WITH MISCHIEF.”]