The correctness, or otherwise, of the Oxford Street sign being attributed to Hogarth has never been determined, but it is quite characteristic of him, and all through Hogarth’s works there runs a curious familiarity with, and insistence upon, signs. You find the sign of the “Duke of Cumberland” pictorially insisted upon in his “Invasion of England,” although it is merely an accessory to the picture; and in “Gin Lane,” “Southwark Fair,” the “March to Finchley,” and others, every detail of incidental signs is shown. This distinguishing characteristic is nowhere more remarkable than in his “Election: Canvassing for Votes,” where, above the heads of the rival agents in bribery is the sign of the “Royal Oak,” half obscured by an election placard. In the distance is seen a mob, about to tear down the sign of the “Crown,” and above the two seated and drinking and smoking figures in the foreground is part of the “Portobello” sign. A curious item in this picture is the fierce effigy of a lion, looking as though it had been the figurehead of a ship, and somewhat resembling those still existing at the “Star” inn, Alfriston, and the “Red Lion,” Martlesham. The classic instance of the dissolute artistic genius, ever drinking in the wayside beerhouse, and leaving long trails of masterpieces behind him in full settlement of paltry scores, is George Morland. He painted exquisitely, for the same reason that the skylark sings divinely, because he could not do otherwise; and no one has represented so finely or so naturally the rustic life of England at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, as he. His chosen companions were “ostlers, potboys, pugilists, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers”--the last two classes, it may be suspected, less from choice than from necessity. He painted over four thousand pictures in his short life of forty-one years, and died in a “sponging-house” for debtors, leaving the all-too-true epitaph for himself, “Here lies a drunken dog.” He lived for a considerable time opposite the “White Lion” inn, at the then rural village of Paddington, and his masterpiece, the “Inside of a Stable,” was painted there. Morland was no neglected genius. His natural, unaffected style, that was no style, in the sense that he showed rustic life as it was, without the “classic” artifice of a Claude or the finicking unreality of a Watteau, appealed alike to connoisseurs and to the uneducated in art; and he might, but for his own hindrance, have been a wealthy man. Dealers besieged him, purse in one hand and bottle in the other. He paid all debts with pictures, and in those inns where he was known the landlords kept a room specially for him, furnished with all the necessaries of his art: only too pleased that, in his ready-made fame, he should settle scores in his characteristic way.