began to think that platters and pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole, cleverest and most refined of dilettanti—who could, and did say the coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford, there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny's blood flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You might have made a collection of the great King Louis's shoes, the heels and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish and Palatinate victories. Mignon of arts and letters, you should have had a petite maison at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your abbés au petit collet, teacups of pâte tendre, fans of chicken-skin painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, che non si mostrano alle donne, you might have been happy. You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn't quite understand him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word, Horace Walpole, I don't think you understood anything belonging to England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor her laws. I don't think that you would have been anywhere more in your element than in France, to make epigrams and orange-flower water, and to have your head cut off in that unsparing harvest of '93, with many more noble heads of corn as clever and as worthless for any purpose of human beneficence as yours, Horace.
For you see, this poor Old Bailey schoolmaster's son—this scion of a line of north-country peasants and swineherds, had in him pre-eminently that which scholiast Warton called the "[Greek: ethos]," the strong sledge-*hammer force of Morality, not given to Walpole—not given to you, fribbles of the present as of the past—to understand. He was scarcely aware of the possession of this quality himself, Hogarth; and when Warton talked pompously of the Ethos in his works, the painter went about with a blank, bewildered face, asking his friends what the doctor meant, and half-inclined to be angry lest the learned scholiast should be quizzing him. It is in the probabilities, however, that William had some little Latin. The dominie in Ship Court did manage to drum some of his grammar disputations into him, and to the end of his life William Hogarth preserved a seemly reverence for classical learning. Often has his etching-needle scratched out some old Roman motto or wise saw upon the gleaming copper. A man need not flout and sneer at the classics because he knows them not. He need not declare Parnassus to be a molehill, because he has lost his alpenstock and cannot pay guides to assist him in that tremendous ascent. There is no necessity to gird at Pyrrha, and declare her to be a worthless jade, because she has never braided her golden hair for you. Of Greek I imagine W. H. to have been destitute; unless, with that ingenious special pleading, which has been made use of to prove that Shakspeare was a lawyer, apothecary, Scotchman, conjuror, poacher, scrivener, courtier—*
