- ceded the car. The colours were wreathed in crape and cypress. Guidon
was there, and the great standard, and many bannerols and achievements of arms. "The mourning horse with trophies and plumades" was gorgeous. There was a horse of state and a mourning horse, sadly led by the dead duke's equerries. And pray note: the minutest details of the procession were copied from the programme of the Duke of Albemarle's funeral (Monk); which, again, was a copy of Oliver Cromwell's—which, again, was a reproduction, on a more splendid scale, of the obsequies of Sir Philip Sidney, killed at Zutphen. Who among us saw not the great scarlet and black show of 1852, the funeral of the Duke of Wellington? Don't you remember the eighty-four tottering old Pensioners, corresponding in number with the years of our heroic brother departed? When gentle Philip Sidney was borne to the tomb, thirty-one poor men followed the hearse. The brave soldier, the gallant gentleman, the ripe scholar, the accomplished writer was so young. Arthur and Philip! And so century shakes hand with century, and the new is ever old, and the last novelty is the earliest fashion, and old Egypt leers from a glass-case, or a four thousand year old fresco, and whispers to Sir Plume, "I, too, wore a curled periwig, and used tweezers to remove superfluous hairs."
In 1726, Hogarth executed a series of plates for Blackwell's Military Figures, representing the drill and manœuvres of the Honourable Artillery Company. The pike and half-pike exercise are very carefully and curiously illustrated; the figures evidently drawn from life; the attitudes very easy. The young man was improving in his drawing; for in 1724, Thornhill had started an academy for studying from the round and from life at his own house, in Covent Garden Piazza; and Hogarth—who himself tells us that his head was filled with the paintings at Greenwich and St. Paul's, and to whose utmost ambition of scratching copper, there was now probably added the secret longing to be a historico-allegorico-scriptural painter I have hinted at, and who hoped some day to make Angels sprawl on coved ceilings, and Fames blast their trumpets on grand staircases—was one of the earliest students at the academy of the king's sergeant painter, and member of parliament for Weymouth. Already William had ventured an opinion, bien tranchée, on high art. In those days there flourished—yes, flourished is the word—a now forgotten celebrity, Kent the architect, gardener, painter, decorator, upholsterer, friend of the great, and a hundred things besides. This artistic jack-of-all-trades became so outrageously popular, and gained such a reputation for taste—if a man have strong lungs, and persists in crying out that he is a genius, the public are sure to believe him at last—that he was consulted on almost every tasteful topic, and was teased to furnish designs for the most incongruous objects. He was consulted for picture-frames, drinking-glasses, barges, dining-room tables, garden-chairs, cradles, and birth-day gowns. One lady he dressed in a petticoat ornamented with columns of the five orders; to another he prescribed a copper-coloured skirt, with gold ornaments. The man was at best but a wretched sciolist; but he for a long period directed the
