- visedly with those of the prolific Spanish playwright. You know how
artfully Lope's plays begin: with what immediate action and seduction of its audience to a foregone conclusion. The curtain draws up. A man in a cloak crosses the stage. A masked cavalier rushes after him with a drawn sword. There is a rixe at once established; the audience begin to imagine all sorts of terrible things, and the success of the piece is half assured. So "auld Hogart's" play of Troy Taken, begins with a rixe. Paris is seen in the very act of running away with Helen; and Menelaus runs after them, calling "Stop thief!" With such an auspicious commencement, and plenty of good boisterous episodes throughout: Hector dragged about by the heels; Thersites cudgelled within an inch of his life; Achilles storming for half an hour at the loss of Patrocles, and a real wooden horse to finish up with: the whole spiced with "auld Hogart's" broadest jokes: who can wonder that Troy Taken achieved immense popularity, and that years after the death of the facetious author, natural philosopher Adam Walker saw the piece performed from recollection by the Troutbeck rustics, the stage a greensward, the auditorium a grassy knoll, the canopy, Heaven? The proceedings were inaugurated by a grand cavalcade, headed by the minstrels of five parishes, and a lusty yeoman mounted on a bull's back and playing on the fiddle; and as a prologue to Troy Taken, there was a pilgrimage of the visitors to a stone dropped by the enemy of mankind in an unsuccessful attempt to build a bridge across Windermere!
The brother of the "auld" dramatist of the Iliad, and third son of the Bampton yeoman, was Richard Hogart. Without being dogmatical, I trust that I am justified in the assumption that the "liquefaction" of the patronymic into Hogarth was due partly to the more elegant education of this yeoman's son, partly to our painter's formation of a "genteel" connection, when he married Jane Thornhill. I have not seen his indentures; and take the authority of Ireland for the registry of his birth; but it is certain that he was at one period called,—ay, and pretty well known—as Hogart: witness Swift, in his hideously clever satire of the Legion Club:—
"How I want thee, hum'rous Hogart,
Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art"—
Now Swift wrote this in Ireland, at a distance from means of accuracy, and the "pleasant rogue's" name was not likely to be found in a calendar of the nobility and gentry. If Bolingbroke or Pope had written to the dean about the rogue and his pleasantries, it is very probable that they might have spelt his name "Hogart," "Hogard," "Hoggert," or "Hogarth." You must remember that scores of the most distinguished characters of the eighteenth century were of my Lord Malmesbury's opinion concerning orthography, that neither the great Duke of Marlborough, nay, nor his duchess, the terrible "old Sarah," nay, nor Mrs. Masham, nay, nor Queen Anne herself, could spell, and that the young Pretender (in the Stuart papers) writes his father's name thus: "Gems" for "James."
