- tracting with Left-legged Jacob to write so many thousand lines for so
many unclipped pieces of money; and Milton selling the manuscript of Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons for five pounds.
Mr. Philip Overton at the Golden Buck, over against St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet Street, also published Hogarth's early plates. He was the purchaser, too, but not yet, of the eighteen illustrations to Hudibras. Ere these appeared, W. H. etched the Taste of the Town, the Small Masquerade Ticket; the Lottery—a very confused and obscure allegory, perhaps a sly parody on one of Laguerre or Thornhill's floundering pictorial parables. Fortune and Wantonness are drawing lucky numbers, Fraud tempts Despair, Sloth hides his head behind a curtain; all very interesting probably at the time, from the number of contemporary portraits the plate may have contained, but almost inexplicable and thoroughly uninteresting to us now. The Taste of the Town, which is otherwise the first Burlington Gate satire (not the Pope and Chandos one) created a sensation, and its author paid the first per-centage on notoriety, by seeing his work pirated by the varlets who did for art that which Edmund Curll, bookseller and scoundrel, did for literature.
Burlington Gate, No. 1, was published in 1723. Hogarth seems to have admired Lord Burlington's love for art, though he might have paid him a better compliment than to have placarded the gate of his palace with an orthographical blunder. There is in the engraving "accademy" for academy. The execution is far superior to that of the South Sea, and the figures are drawn with much verve and decision. In the centre stand three little figures, said to represent Lord Burlington, Campbell, the
