In a kind of copartnership with Mr. Powell's puppets—formerly of the Piazza, Covent Garden, was the famous Faux, the legerdemain, or sleight-of-hand conjuror—the Wiljalba Frikell of his day, and whom Hogarth mentions in one of his earliest pictorial satires. But Faux did that which the Russian magician, to his credit, does not do: he puffed himself perpetually, and was at immense pains to assure the public through the newspapers that he was not robbed returning from the Duchess of Buckingham's at Chelsea. From Faux's show at the "Long-room," Hogarth might have stepped to Heidegger's—hideous Heidegger's masquerades at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, where also were held "ridotti," and "veglioni"—junketings of an ultra Italian character, and all presented in 1722 by the Middlesex grand jury as intolerable nuisances. Many times, also, did the stern Sir John Gonson (the Harlot's Progress Gonson), justice of peace, much feared by the Phrynes of the hundreds of Drury, inveigh in his sessions-charges against the sinful ridotti and the disorderly veglioni. Other performances took place at the King's Theatre. There was struggling for its first grasp on the English taste and the English pocket—a grasp which it has never since lost—that anomalous, inconsistent, delightful entertainment, the Italian Opera. Hogarth, as a true-born Briton, hated the harmonious exotic; and from his earliest plates to the grand series of the Rake's Progress, indulges in frequent flings at Handel (in his Ptolomeo, and before his immortal Oratorio stage), Farinelli, Cuzzoni, Senesino, Faustina, Barrenstadt, and other "soft simpering whiblins." Yet the sturdiest hater of this "new taste of the town" could not refrain from admiring and applauding to the echo that which was called the "miraculously dignified exit of Senesino." This celebrated sortita must have resembled in the almost electrical effect it produced, the elder Kean's "Villain, be sure thou prove," &c. in Othello; John Kemble's "Mother of the world—" in Coriolanus; Madame Pasta's "Io," in Medea; and Ristori's world-known "Tu," in the Italian version of the same dread trilogy. One of the pleasantest accusations brought against the Italian Opera was preferred some years before 1720, in the Spectator, when it was pointed out that the principal man or woman singer sang in Italian, while the responses were given, and the choruses chanted by Britons. Judices, in these latter days, I have "assisted" at the performance of the Barber of Seville at one of our large theatres, when Figaro warbled in Italian with a strong Spanish accent, when Susanna was a Frenchwoman, Doctor Bartolo an Irishman, and the chorus sang in English, and without any H's.
More shows remain for Hogarth to take delight in. The quacks, out of Bartlemy time, set up their standings in Moorfields by the madhouse (illustrated by Hogarth in the Rake's Progress), and in Covent Garden Market (W. H. in the plate of Morning), by Inigo Jones's rustic church, which he built for the Earl of Bedford: "Build me a barn," quoth the earl. "You shall have the bravest barn in England," returned Inigo, and his lordship had it. There were quacks too, though the loud-voiced
