affairs taken by the younger leaders of the Boers in the Transvaal. During 1906 he gave offence to the extreme section of the Bond by some criticisms of the taal and his use of English in public speeches. At the general election in 1908 the Bond, still largely under his direction, gained a victory at the polls, but Hofmeyr himself was not a candidate. In the renewed movement for the closer union of the South African colonies he advocated federation as opposed to unification. When, however, the unification proposals were ratified by the Cape parliament, Hofmeyr procured his nomination as one of the Cape delegates to England in the summer of 1909 to submit the draft act of union to the imperial government. He attended the conferences with the officials of the Colonial Office for the preparation of the draft act, and after the bill had become law went to Germany for a “cure.” He returned to London in October 1909, where he died on the 16th of that month. His body was taken to Cape Town for burial.
HOFSTEDE DE GROOT, PETRUS (1802–1886), Dutch
theologian, was born at Leer in East Friesland, Prussia, on the
8th of October 1802, and was educated at the Gymnasium and
university of Groningen. For three years (1826–1829) he was
pastor of the Reformed Church at Ulrum, and then entered upon
his lifelong duties as professor of theology at Groningen. With
his colleagues L. G. Pareau, J. F. van Vordt, and W. Muurling
he edited from 1837 to 1872 the Waarheid in Liefde. In this
review and in his numerous books he vigorously upheld the
orthodox faith against the Dutch “modern theology” movement.
Many of his works were written in Latin, including
Disputatio, qua ep. ad Hebraeos cum Paulin. epistolis comparatur
(1826), Institutiones historiae ecclesiae (1835), Institutio theologiae
naturalis (1842), Encyclopaedia theologi christiani (1844). Others,
in Dutch, were: The Divine Education of Humanity up to the
Coming of Jesus Christ (3 vols., 1846), The Nature of the Gospel
Ministry (1858), The “Modern Theology ” of the Netherlands
(1869), The Old Catholic Movement (1877). He became professor
emeritus in 1872, and died at Groningen on the 5th of December
1886.
HOGARTH, WILLIAM (1697–1764), the great English
painter and pictorial satirist, was born at Bartholomew Close
in London on the 10th of November 1697, and baptized on the
28th in the church of St Bartholomew the Great. He had two
younger sisters, Mary, born in 1699, and Ann, born in 1701.
His father, Richard Hogarth, who died in 1718, was a schoolmaster
and literary hack, who had come to the metropolis to
seek that fortune which had been denied to him in his native
Westmorland. The son seems to have been early distinguished
by a talent for drawing and an active perceptive faculty rather
than by any close attention to the learning which he was soon
shrewd enough to see had not made his parent prosper. “Shows
of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant,” he
says, “and mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in
me.... My exercises when at school were more remarkable for
the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise itself.”
This being the case, it is no wonder that, by his own desire,
he was apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver, Mr Ellis Gamble,
at the sign of the “Golden Angel” in Cranbourne Street or
Alley, Leicester Fields. For this master he engraved a shop-card
which is still extant. When his apprenticeship began is
not recorded; but it must have been concluded before the
beginning of 1720, for in April of that year he appears to have
set up as engraver on his own account. His desires, however,
were not limited to silver-plate engraving. “Engraving on
copper was, at twenty years of age, my utmost ambition.”
For this he lacked the needful skill as a draughtsman; and his
account of the means which he took to supply this want, without
too much interfering with his pleasure, is thoroughly characteristic,
though it can scarcely be recommended as an example.
“Laying it down,” he says, “first as an axiom, that he who
could by any means acquire and retain in his memory, perfect
ideas of the subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a
knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath
of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite
combinations (each of these being composed of lines), and would
consequently be an accurate designer, ... I therefore endeavoured
to habituate myself to the exercise of a sort of technical
memory, and by repeating in my own mind, the parts of which
objects were composed, I could by degrees combine and put
them down with my pencil.” This account, it is possible, has
something of the complacency of the old age in which it was
written; but there is little doubt that his marvellous power
of seizing expression owed less to patient academical study
than to his unexampled eye-memory and tenacity of minor
detail. But he was not entirely without technical training,
since, by his own showing, he occasionally “took the life” to
correct his memories, and is known to have studied at Sir James
Thornhill’s then recently opened art school.
“His first employment” (i.e. after he set up for himself) “seems,” says John Nichols, in his Anecdotes, “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 Scheme,” 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 protégé, the architect painter William Kent, who is here represented on the summit of 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 Danes, 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 1727–1728 belongs one of those rare occurrences which have survived as contributions to his biography. He was engaged by Joshua 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” (i.e. groups in oil of full-length portraits from 12 to 15 in. 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 Conversation,” “The House of Commons examining Bambridge,” an infamous warden of the Fleet, and several pictures of the chief actors in Gay’s popular Beggar’s Opera.
On the 23rd 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 Anne Boleyn, and he also permitted Hayman to make copies of the later series of the “Four Times of the Day.”
