“His first employment” (i.e., after he set up for himself) “seems,” says Nichols, “to have been the engraving of arms and shop bills.” After this he was employed in designing “plates for booksellers.” Of these early and mostly insignificant works we may pass over The Lottery, an Emblematic Print on the South Sea, and some book illustrations, to pause at Masquerades and Operas, 1724, the first plate he published on his own account. This is a clever little satire on contemporary follies, such as the masquerades of the Swiss adventurer Heidegger, the popular Italian opera singers, Rich’s pantomimes at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and last, but by no means least, the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington’s frrotege, the architect painter William Kent, who is here represented on the summit cf Burlington Gate, with Raphael and Michelangelo for supporters. This worthy Hogarth had doubtless not learned to despise less in the school of his rival Sir James Thornhill. Indeed almost ’ the next of Hogarth’s important prints was aimed at Kent alone, being that memorable burlesque of the unfortunate altarpiece designed by the latter for St Clement’s Danes, and which, in deference to the ridicule of the parishioners, Bishop Gibson took down in 1725, Hogarth’s squib, which appeared subsequently, exhibits it as a very masterpiece of confusion and bad drawing. In 1726 he prepared twelve large engravings for Butler’s Hudibras. These he himself valued highly, and they are the best of his book illustrations. But he was far too individual to be the patient interpreter of other men’s thoughts, and it is not in this direction that his successes are to be sought.

To 1727-28 belongs one of those rare occurrences which have survived as contributions to his biography. He was engaged by a certain Morris, a tapestry worker, to prepare a design for the Element of Earth. Morris, however, having heard that he was “an engraver and no painter,” declined the work when completed, and Hogarth accordingly sued him for the money in the Westminster Court, where, on the 28th of May 1728, the case was decided in his (Hogarth’s) favour. It may have been the aspersion thus early cast on his skill as a painter (coupled perhaps with the unsatisfactory state of print-selling, owing to the uncontrolled circulation of piratical copies) that induced him about this time to turn his attention to the production of “small conversation pieces” (7.e., groups in oil of full-length portraits from 12 to 15 inches high), many of which are still preserved in different collections. “This,” he says, “having novelty, succeeded for a few years.” Among his other efforts in oil between 1728 and 1732 were The Wanstead Assembly, The House of Commons examining Barnbridge, an infamous warden of the Fleet, and numerous pictuιe> of the chief actors in Gay’s popular Beggar's Opera.

On the 23d of March 1729 he was married at old Paddington church to Jane Thornhill, the only daughter of Kent’s rival above-mentioned. The match was a clandestine one, although Lady Thornhill appears to have favoured it. We next hear of him in “lodgings at South Lambeth,” where he rendered some assistance to the then well-known Jonathan Tyers, who opened Vauxhall in 1732 with an entertainment styled a ridotto al fresco. For these gardens Hogarth painted a poor picture of Henry VIII. and Anna Bullen, and for them he also made some designs of the Four Times of the Day, which he afterwards elaborated into a finished series. The only engravings between 1726 and 1732 which need be referred to are the Large Masquerade Ticket (1727), another satire on masquerades, and the print of Burlington Gate, 1731, evoked by Pope’s Epistle to Lord Burlington, and defending Lord Chandos, who is therein satirized. This print gave great offence, and was, it is said, suppressed. To 1732 belongs that genial journey from London to Sheerness, of which the original record still survives at the British Museum in an oblong MS. volume, entitled An Account of ιvhat seem'd most Remarkable in the Five Days' Peregrination of the Five Folloιving Persons, Vizt., Messieurs Tothall. Scott, Hogarth, Thornhill and Forrest. Begun on Saturday May 21th 1732 and Finish'd On the 31si of the Same Month. Abi tu et fac similiter.—Inscription on Dulwich Colledge Porch. The journal, which is written by Forrest, the father of Garrick’s friend Theodosius Forrest, gives a good idea of what a “frisk ”—as Johnson called it—was in those days, while the illustrations were by Hogarth and Samuel Scott the landscape painter. John Thornhill, Sir James’s son, made the map. This version (in prose) was subsequently run into rhyme by one of Hogarth’s friends, the Rev. Mr Gostling of Canterbury, and after the artist’s death both versions were published. In the absence of other biographical detail, they are of considerable interest to the student of Hogarth.

In 1733 Hogarth moved into the “Golden Head” in Leicester Fields, which, with occasional absences at Chiswick, he continued to occupy until his death. By this date he must have completed the earliest of those great series of moral paintings which first gave him his position as a great and original genius. This was A Harlot’s Progress, the paintings for which, if we may trust the date in the last of the pictures, were finished in 1731. The engravings, by the artist himself, were published in 1734. We have no record of the particular train of thought which prompted these story-pictures; but it may perhaps be fairly assumed that the necessity for creating some link of interest between the personages of the little “conversation pieces” above referred to led to the further idea of connecting several groups or scenes so as to form a sequent narrative. “I wished,” says Hogarth, “to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage.” “I have endeavoured,” he says again, “to treat my subject as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures are to exhibit a dumb show." There was never a more eloquent dumb show than this of the Harlot’s Progress. In six scenes the miserable career of a woman of the town is traced out remorselessly from its first facile beginning to its shameful and degraded end. Nothing of the detail is softened or abated; the whole is acted out coram ρopulo, with the hard, uncompassionate morality of the age the painter lived in, while the introduction here and there of one or two well-known characters like Colonel Chatteris and Justice Gonson give a vivid reality to the satire. It had an immediate success. To say nothing of the fact that the talent of the paintings completely reconciled Sir James Thornhill to the son-in law he had hitherto refused to acknowledge, more than twelve hundred names of subscribers to the engravings were entered in the artist’s book. On the appearance of plate iii. the lords of the treasury trooped to Leicester Fields for Sir John Gonson’s portrait which it contained. Theophilus Cibber made the story into a pantomime, and some one else into a ballad opera; and it gave rise to numerous pamphlets and poems. It was painted on fan-mounts and transferred to cups and saucers. Lastly, it was freely pirated. There could be no surer testimony to its popularity.

The favourable reception given to A Harlot’s Progress prompted A Rake’s Progress, which speedily followed, although it had not a like success. It was in eight plates in lieu of six. The story is unequal; but there is nothing finer than the figure of the desperate rake in the Covent Garden gaming-house, or the admirable scenes in the Fleet prison and Bedlam, where at last his headlong career comes to its tragic termination. The plates abound with allusive suggestion and covert humour; but it is impossible to attempt any detailed-description of them here.

A Rake’s Progress was dated June 25, 1735, and the engravings bear the words “according to Act of Parliament.” This was an Act (8 Geo. II. cap. 13) which Hogarth had been instrumental in obtaining from the legislature, being stirred thereto by the shameless piracies of rival printsellers. Although loosely drawn, it served its purpose; and the painter commemorated his success by a long inscription on the plate entitled Crowns, Mitres, &c., afterwards used as a subscription ticket to the Election series. These subscription tickets to his engravings, let us add, are among the brightest and most vivacious of the artist’s productions. That to the Harlot’s Progress was entitled Boys peeping at Nature, while the Rake’s Progress was heralded by the delighful etching known as A Pleased Audience at a Play, or The Laughing Audience.

We must pass more briefly over the prints which followed the two Progresses, noting first A Midnight Modern Conversation, an admirable drinking scene which comes between them in 1734, and the bright little plate of Southwark Fair, which, though dated 1733, was published with A Rake’s Progress in 1735. Between these and Marriage à la Mode, upon the pictures of which the painter must have been not long after at work, come the small prints of the Consultation of Physicians, Scholars at a Lecture, and Sleeping Congregation, 1736; the Four Times of the Day, 1738, a series of pictures of everyday 18th century life, the earlier designs for which have been already referred to; the Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn, 1738, which Walpole held to be, “for wit and imagination, without any other end, the best of all the painter’s works;” and finally the admirable plates of the Distrest Poet, painfully composing a poem on “Riches” in a garret, and the Enraged Musician fulminating from his parlour window upon a discordant orchestra of knife-grinders, milk-girls, ballad-singers, and the rest upon the pavement outside. These are dated respectively 1736 and 1741. To this period also (i.e., the period preceding the production of the plates of Marriage à la Mode) belong two of those history pictures to which, in emulation of the Haymans and Thornhills, the artist was continually attracted. The Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan, “with figures seven feet high,” were painted circa 1736, and presented by the artist to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where they remain. They were not masterpieces; and it is pleasanter to think of his connexion with Captain Coram’s recently established Foundling Hospital (1739), which he aided with his money, his graver, and his brush, and for which he painted that admirable portrait of the good old philanthropist which is still, and deservedly, one of its chief ornaments.

In A Harlot’s Progress Hogarth had not strayed much beyond the lower walks of society, and although, in /V Rake’s Progress, his hero was taken from the middle classes, he can scarcely be said to have quitted those fields of observation which are common to every spectator. It is therefore more remarkable, looking to his education and antecedents, that his masterpiece, Marriage à la Mode, should successfully depict, as the advertisement has it, “a variety of modern occurrences in high life.” Yet, as an accurate delineation of the surroundings of upper class 18th century society, his Marriage à la Mode has never, we believe, been seriously assailed. The countess’s bedroom, the earl’s apartment with its lavish coronets and old masters, the grand saloon with its marble pillars and grotesque ornaments, are fully as true to nature as the frowsy chamber in the “Turk’s Head Bagnio,” the quack-doctor’s museum in St Martin’s Lane, or the mean opulence of the merchant’s house in the city. And what story could be more vividly, more perspicuously, more powerfully told than this godless alliance of sacs et parchemins — this miserable tragedy of an ill-assorted marriage? There is no defect of invention, no superfluity of detail, no purposeless stroke. It has the merit of a work by a great master of fiction, with the additional advantages which result from the pictorial fashion of the narrative; and it is matter for congratulation that it is still to be seen by all the world in the National Gallery, where it can tell its own tale better than pages of commentary.

The engravings of Marriage à la Mode were dated April 1745. Although the painter by this time found a ready market for his engravings, he does not appear to have been equally successful in selling his pictures. The people bought his prints; but the more opulent and not numerous connoisseurs who purchased pictures were wholly in the hands of the importers and manufacturers of “old masters.” In February 1745 the original oil paintings of the two Progresses, the Four Times of the Day, and the Strolling Actresses were still unsold. On the last day of that month Hogarth disposed of them by an ill-devised kind of auction, the details of which may be read in Nichols’s Anecdotes, for the paltry sum of £427, 7s. No better fate attended Marriage à la Mode, which five years later became the property of Mr Lane of Hillingdon for 120 guineas, being then in Carlo Maratti frames which had cost the artist four guineas a piece. Something of this was no doubt due to Hogarth’s impracticable arrangements, but the fact shows conclusively how completely blind his contemporaries were to his merits as a painter, and how hopelessly in bondage to the all-powerful picture-dealers. Of these latter the painter himself gave a graphic picture in a letter addressed by him under the pseudonym of “Britophil” to the St James's Evening Post, in 1737.

But, if Hogarth was not successful with his dramas on canvas, he occasionally shared with his contemporaries in the popularity of portrait painting. For a picture, executed in 1746, of Garrick as Richard III. he was paid £200, “which was more,” says he, “than any English artist ever received for a single portrait.” In the same year a sketch of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, afterwards beheaded on Tower Hill, had an exceptional success. Our limits do not, however, enable us to refer to his remaining works in detail, and we must content ourselves with a brief enumeration of the most important. These are The Stage Coach or Country Inn Yard, 1747; the series of twelve plates entitled Industry and Idleness, 1747, depicting the career of two London apprentices; the Gate of Calais, 1749, which had its origin in a rather unfortunate visit paid to France by the painter after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; the March to Finchley, 1750; Beer Street, Gin Lane, and the Four Stages of Cruelty, 1751; the admirable representations of election humours in the days of Sir Robert Walpole, entitled Four Prints of an Election, 1755-8; and the plate of Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, a Medley, 1762, adapted from an earlier unpublished design called Enthusiasm Delineated. Besides these must be chronicled three more essays in the “great style of history painting,” viz., 1’aul before Felix, Moses brought to Pharaoh’s Daughter, and the Altarpiece for St Mary Redcliff at Bristol. The first two were engraved in 1751-2, the last in 1794. A subscription ticket to the earlier pictures, entitled Paul before Felix Burlesqued, had a popularity far greater than that of the prints themselves.

In 1745 Hogarth painted that admirable portrait of himself with his pug-dog Trump, which is now in the National Gallery. In a corner of this he had drawn on a palette a serpentine line with the words “The Line of Beauty and Grace.” Much inquiry ensued as to “the meaning of this hieroglyphic;” and in an unpropitious hour the painter resolved to explain his meaning in writing. The result was the well-known Analysis of Beauty, 1753, a treatise “to fix the fluctuating ideas of Taste,” otherwise a desultory essay having for pretext the precept attributed to Michelangelo that a figure should be always “Pyramidali, Serpent-like, and multiplied by one two and three.” The fate of the book was what might have been expected. By the painter’s adherents it was praised as a final deliverance upon aesthetics; by his enemies and professional rivals, its obscurities, and the minor errors which, notwithstanding the benevolent efforts of literary friends, the work had not escaped, were made the subject of endless ridicule and caricature. It added little to its author’s fame, and it is perhaps to be regretted that he ever undertook it. Moreover, there were further humiliations in store for him. In 1759 the success of a little picture called The Lady’s Last Stake, painted for Lord Charlemont, procured him a commission from Sir Richard Grosvenor to paint another picture “upon the same terms.” Unhappily on this occasion he deserted his own field of genre and social satire, to select the story from Boccaccio (or rather Dryden) of Sigismonda weeping over the heart of her murdered lover Guiscardo, being the subject of a picture by Furini in Sir Luke Schaub’s collection which had recently been sold for £400. The picture, over which he spent much time and patience, was not regarded as a success; and Sir Richard rather meanly shuffled out of his bargain upon the plea that “the constantly having it before one’s eyes would be too often occasioning melancholy thoughts to arise in one’s mind.” Sigismonda, therefore, much to the artist’s mortification, and the delight of the malicious, remained upon his hands. As, by her husband’s desire, his widow valued it at £500, it found no purchaser until after her death, when the Boydells bought it for 56 guineas. It was exhibited, with others of Hogarth’s pictures, at the Spring Gardens exhibition of 1761, for the catalogue of which Hogarth engraved a Head-piece and a Tail-piece which are still the delight of collectors; and finally, by the bequest of the late Mr J. H. Anderdon, it passed in 1879 to the National Gallery, where, in spite of...

His Shepherd's Calendar is the best of Hogg’s prose works; but it is mainly as a great peasant poet that he lives in literature. Nothing can be more exquisite than some of his lyrics and minor poems—his “Skylark,” “When the Kye comes Hame,” his verses on the “Comet” and “Evening Star,” and his “Address to Lady Ann Scott.” The Queen's Wake unites his characteristic excellences—his command of the old romantic ballad style, his graceful fairy mythology, and his aerial flights of imagination. The story of Kilmeny stands at the head of all our fairy tales, and is inimitable for its scenes of visionary splendour, purity, and bliss, linked to the fairest objects of earthly interest and affection. In such compositions Hogg seems completely transformed; he is absorbed in the ideal and supernatural, and might have claimed over all his contemporaries the Delphic laurel for direct and immediate inspiration.

See a memoir by Professor Wilson, prefixed to an edition of Hogg’s works published by Blackie & Co. in 1850; Wilson’s Nοctes Ambro- sianoe ; Gilfillan’s First Gallery of Literary Portraits ; Cunningham’s Biog. and Crit. Hist, of Lit. ; and the general index to Blackwoods Magazine. A collected edition of Hogg’s Tales appeared in 1838 in 6 vols., and a second in 1851; his collected Poems were published in 1850 and in 1852. For an admirable account of the social entertainments Hogg used to give in Edinburgh, see Memoir of Robert Chambers, by Dr William Chambers, pp. 263-270.