Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/60

50 &quot; which I derived from these two engravings &quot; (of Wilkes and Churchill), &quot; together with occasionally riding on horseback, restored me to as much health as can be expected at my time of life.&quot; He produced but one more print, that of Finis, or The Bathos, March 1764, a strange jumble of &quot;fag ends,&quot; intended as a tail-piece to his collected prints; and on the 26th October of the same year he died of an aneurism at his house in Leicester Square. His wife, to whom he left his plates as a chief source of income, sur vived him until 1789. He was buried in Chiswick church yard, where a tomb was erected to him by his friends in 1771, with a well-known epitaph by Garrick. Not far off, on the road to Chiswick Gardens, is the now tumble-down house in which, for many years of his life, he spent the summer seasons. From such records of him as survive, Hogarth appears to have been much what from his portrait one might suppose him to have been a blue-eyed, honest, combative, little man, thoroughly national in his prejudices and anti pathies, fond of flattery, sensitive like most satirists, a good friend, an intractable enemy, ambitious, as he somewhere says, in all things to be singular, and not always accurately estimating the extent of his powers. With the art connois- seurship of his day he was wholly at war, because, as he believed, it favoured foreign mediocrity at the expense of native talent ; and in the heat of argument he would pro bably, as he admits, often come &quot; to utter blasphemous expressions against the divinity even of Raphael Urbino, Correggio, and Michelangelo.&quot; But it was rather against the third-rate copies of third-rate artists the &quot;ship-loads of manufactured Dead Christs, Holy Families, and Madonnas &quot; that his indignation was directed ; and in speaking of his attitude with regard to the great masters of art, it is well .to remember his words to Mrs Piozzi : &quot; The connoisseurs and I are at war you know ; and because I hate them, they think I hate Titian and let them ! &quot; But no doubt it was in a measure owing to this hostile attitude of his towards the all-powerful picture-brokers that his contemporaries failed to adequately recognize his merits as a painter, and persisted in regarding him as an ingenious humorist alone. Time has reversed that unjust sentence. He is now held to have been an excellent painter, pure and harmonious in his colouring, wonderfully dexterous and direct in his handling, and in his composition leaving little or nothing to be desired. As an engraver his work is more conspicuous for its vigour, spirit, and intelligibility than for finish and beauty of line. He desired that it should tell its own tale plainly, and bear the distinct im press of his individuality, and in this he thoroughly suc ceeded. As a draughtsman his skill has sometimes been debated, and his work at times undoubtedly bears marks of haste, and even carelessness. If, however, he is judged by his best instead of his worst, his work will not be found to be wanting in this respect. But it is not after all as a draughtsman, an engraver, or a painter that he claims his pre-eminence among English artists it is as a wit, a humor ist, a satirist upon canvas. Regarded in this light he has never been equalled, whether for his vigour of realism and dramatic power, his fancy and invention in the decoration of his story, or his merciless anatomy and exposure of folly and wickedness. If we regard him as he loved to regard himself as &quot;author&quot; rather than &quot;artist,&quot; his place is with the great masters of literature, with the Thackerays and Fieldings, the Cervantes and Molieres.

1em  HOGG, (1770–1835), a Scottish poet, best known by his title of the &quot; Ettrick Shepherd,&quot; was bora on the banks of the Ettrick in Selkirkshire in 1770. His ancestors had been shepherds for centuries, He received hardly any school training, and seems to have had difficulty in getting books to read. After spending his early years under different masters, first as cow-herd and afterwards as shepherd, he was engaged in the latter capacity by Mr Laidlaw, tenant of Blackhouse, in the parish of Yarrow, from 1790 till 1799. He was treated with great kindness, and had access to a large collection of books, which he soon exhausted, and then mbscribed to a circulating library in Peebles. While attending to his flock, he spent a great deal of time in reading. His first printed piece was &quot; The Mistakes of a Night,&quot; which appeared in the Scots Magazine for October 1794, and was succeeded by Scots Pastorals in 1801. A year or two after this publication Hogg became acquainted with Sir Walter Scott a connexion which had a powerful influence for good on the peasant poet. He again appeared before the public in 1807 as the author of the Mountain Bard, to which Scott wrote an introductory notice. By this work, and by a Treatise on the Diseases of Sheep, Hogg realized abuut 300. With this money he unfortunately embarked in farming in Dumfriesshire, and in three years was utterly ruined, and had to abandon all his effects to his creditors. He returned to Ettrick, and there found only cold and estranged looks. He could not even obtain employment as a shepherd ; so he set off in February 1810 to push his fortune in Edinburgh as a literary adventurer. In the same year he published a collection of songs, which, being dedicated to the countess of Dalkeith, and recommended to her notice by Scott, was rewarded with a present of 100 guineas. He then commenced a weekly periodical, The Spy, which he continued from September 1810 till August 1811. The appearance of the Queen s Wake in 1813 established Hogg s reputation as a poet; it was followed by Mador of the Moor, The Pilgrims of the Sun, and The Poetic Mirror. The duchess of Buccleuch, on her death-bed in 1814, had asked the duke to do something for the Ettrick bard ; and the duke gave him a lease for life of the farm of Altrive in Yarrow, con sisting of about 70 acres of moorland, on which the poet built a house and spent the last years of his life. He took possession of it in 1817; but his literary exertions were never relaxed. Before 1820 he had written The Brownie of Bodsbeck, and two volumes of Winter Evening Tales, besides collecting, editing, and writing part of two volumes of Jacobite Relics, and contributing largely to Blackivood s Magazine. In 1820 he married Miss Margaret Phillips, a lady of a good Annandale family, and found himself possessed of about 1000, a good house, and a well-stocked farm. Hogg s connexion with Blackivood s Magazine kept him continually before the public. The wit and mischief of some of his literary friends made free with his name, and represented him in ludicrous and grotesque aspects ; but the effect of the whole was favour able to his popularity. He visited London in 1831, and was feasted by the nobility, literati, and public men of the metropolis. On his return a public dinner was given to him in Peebles, Professor Wilson in the chair, and he acknowledged that he had at last &quot;found fame.&quot; His 