and Robin Barelegs the shoeblack at the corner of Cranbourn Street. He drew a pretty configurement of Mistress Gamble, my wife deceased, in her Oudenarde tire, and lapels of Mechlin point, and Sunday sack. But there was ever a leaning towards the caricatura in him, sir. Sure never mortal since Jacques Callot the Frenchman (whose 'Habits and Beggars' he was much given to study) ever drew such hideous, leering satyrs. And he had a way too, of making the griffins laugh and the lions dance gambadoes, so to speak, on their hind legs in the escocheons he graved, which would never have passed the College of Arms. Sir, the tankard out: what! drawer, there."
Thus Ellis Gamble mythically seen and heard. But to the realities. In 1720 or '21, Hogarth's father, the poor old dominie, was removed to a land where no grammar disputations are heard, and where one dictionary is as good as another. Hogarth's sisters had previously kept a "frock shop" in the city; they removed westward after the old man's death, and probably occupied their brother's place of business in Little Cranbourn Alley, when, giving up a perhaps momentary essay in the vocation of a working tradesman, he elected to be, instead, a working artist. For Mary and Ann Hogarth he engraved a shop-card, representing the interior of a somewhat spacious warehouse with sellers and customers, and surmounted by the king's arms. The sisters could not have possessed much capital; and there have not been wanting malevolent spirits—chiefly of the Wilkite way of thinking—to hint that the Misses Hogarths' "old frock-shop" was indeed but a very old slop-, not to say rag-shop, and that the proper insignia for their warehouse would have been not the royal arms, but a certain image, sable, pendent, clad in a brief white garment: a black doll of the genuine Aunt Sally proportions.
William Hogarth out of his apprenticeship is, I take it, a sturdy, ruddy-complexioned, clear-eyed, rather round-shouldered young fellow, who as yet wears his own hair, but has that sword at home—a silver-hilted or a prince's metal one—and is not averse to giving his hat a smart cock, ay, and bordering it with a narrow rim of orrice when Fortune smiles on him. Not yet was the [Greek: ÊTHOS] developed in him. It was there, yet latent. But, instead, that quality with which he was also so abundantly gifted, and which combined so well with his sterner faculties—I mean the quality of humorous observation—must have begun to assert itself. "Engraving on copper was at twenty years of age my utmost ambition," he writes himself. Yes, William, and naturally so. The monsters and chimeras of heraldry and Mr. Gamble's back-shop had by that time probably thoroughly palled on him. Fortunate if a landscape, or building, or portrait had sometimes to be engraved on a silver snuff-box or a golden fan-mount. The rest was a wilderness of apocryphal natural history, a bewildering phantasmagoria of strange devices from St. Benet's Hill, expressed in crambo, in jargon, and in heraldic romany: compony, gobony, and chequy; lions erased and tigers couped; bucks trippant and bucks vulnèd; eagles segreiant, and dogs sciant; bezants, plates, torteaux, pomeis, golps, san-
