sign, the "Golden Head," and not the "Painter's Head," as I have elsewhere put it. There he died. There his widow lived for many—many years afterwards, always loving and lamenting the great artist and good man, her husband. It was about Leicester Fields too—nay, unless I mistake, in Cranbourn Alley itself, that old nutcracker-faced Nollekens the sculptor pointed out William to Northcote the painter. "There," he cried, "see, there's Hogarth." He pointed to where stood a little stout-faced sturdy man in a sky-blue coat, who was attentively watching a quarrel between two street boys. It was Mr. Mulready's "Wolf and the Lamb" story a little before its time. The bigger boy oppressed the smaller; whereupon Hogarth patted the diminutive victim on the head, and gave him a coin, and said with something like a naughty word that he wouldn't stand it, if he was the small boy: no, not he.
Seven years at cross-hatch and double cypher. Seven years turning and re-turning salvers and tankards on the leathern pad, and every month and every year wielding the graver and burnisher with greater strength and dexterity. What legions of alphabets, in double cypher, he must have "drawn with great correctness;" what dictionary loads of Latin and Norman-French mottoes he must have flourished beneath the coats of arms! Oh, the scutcheons he must have blazoned in the symbolism of lines! Blank for argent, dots for or, horizontal for azure, vertical for gules, close-chequer for sable. The griffins, the lions, the dragons, rampant, couchant, regardant, langued, gorged, he must have drawn! The chevrons, the fesses, the sinoples of the first! He himself confesses that his just notions of natural history were for a time vitiated by the constant contemplation and delineation of these fabulous monsters, and that when he was out of his time he was compelled to unlearn all his heraldic zoology. To the end his dogs were very much in the "supporter" style, and the horses in the illustrations in Hudibras strongly resemble hippogriffs.
He must have been studying, and studying hard, too, at drawing, from the round and plane during his 'prentice years. Sir Godfrey Kneller had a kind of academy at his own house in 1711; but Sir James Thornhill did not establish his till long after Hogarth had left the service of Ellis Gamble. Hogarth tells us that as a boy he had access to the studio of a neighbouring painter. Who may this have been? Francis Hoffmann; Hubertz; Hulzberg, the warden of the Lutheran Church in the Savoy; Samuel Moore of the Custom House? Perhaps his earliest instructor was some High Dutch etcher of illustrations living eastwards to be near the booksellers in Paternoster Row; or perhaps the "neighbouring painter" was an artist in tavern and shop signs. Men of no mean proficiency wrought in that humble but lucrative line of emblematic art in Anna's "silver age."
That Hogarth possessed considerable graphic powers when he engraved Ellis Gamble's shop-card, you have only to glance at the angel holding the palm above the commercial announcement, to be at once convinced. This figure, however admirably posed and draped, may have been copied
