Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/21

 10 The other defeated candidates are soon dismissed. Douglas is a brilliant and not very high principled demagogue. In many ways, talent excepted, he resembles Webster. He will doubtless run again as President. Bell, of Tennessee, is an old man, for quiet and union at all risks. Breckenridge is a young Kentucky gentleman of great promise, but too young for president. Lane is a nobody from outlying Oregon. Everett, the historian, is not publicly great. He always stood very low on the betting list.

Let us not rate Lincoln too high: a President has really not much motive power. He is not an originator; conscience and party keep him down; Abe will probably do nothing. If troubles run high, every one knows a popular war with Mexico, or with Spain for Cuba, would quiet them directly. Every sensible American feels that the north cannot do without the south, or the south without the north. One has money, the other cotton. The one is afraid to rebel, the other afraid to strike. The two parties are exactly in the absurd position of the poet in the old political epigram—

Though slave-holding volunteers are drilling under the palmettos in Charleston, though Alabama buys powder, though Virginia collects muskets, and fiery South Carolina borrows cannon, I think no trouble will ensue just yet. The fire will smoke out; the prudent will spit and wait for Lincoln’s first overt act. This may have large consequences. At present the cotton crop is just ready for selling, but I do think, as do wiser and more far seeing men than myself, that in the case of a second abolitionist President being elected, the South will lose all hope, get mad and desperate, and risk all in a blow at Northern Freedom. .

the 26th day of October, 1764, died William Hogarth. Very ailing and feeble in body, but still with his heart up and his mind, as ever, quick and vigorous and full of life, he had moved on the day before from his pleasant snug cottage at Chiswick to his town house in Leicester Fields. He turned now and then in his bed uneasily, as he felt the venomous slanders of Wilkes and Churchill still wounding and stinging him like mosquito bites: else was the good little man at peace. “I have invariably endeavoured to make those about me tolerably happy.” “My greatest enemy cannot say I ever did an intentional injury.” So he wrote at the close of his life; and there was much love for him in the world, culminating in his own household. His servants all had been years and years in his service, he had painted their portraits and hung them up in his house; there is homage to both master and servants in the fact. After all, a man may, if he chooses, be a hero even to his valet de chambre. None could have dreamt the end was so near; it is not known that any doctor was attending him. He had read and answered a letter in the morning; fatigued with the effort, he had retired to bed. He was alone when the fatal attack came on, the “suffusion of blood among the arteries of the heart.” Starting up, he rang the bell with a violence that broke it in pieces; they had not thought so much strength remained to him. He fell back fainting in the arms of Mary Lewis, his wife’s niece; she had lived in his house all her life, and was his confidential assistant in publishing and selling his prints. She supported the poor creature for two hours, and he drew his last breath in her arms.

Widow Hogarth wore her deep crape, be sure, with an aching void in her heart, and an acute sense of the painful wrench to her life caused by this bereavement. A fine stately woman still, though she was now fifty-five. She had sat for Sigismunda but six years back (the dreadful mistake in historical art which poor William had vainly perpetrated in emulation of Correggio). Something of the beauty of the Jane Thornhill, who thirty years before had stolen away with her lover to be married at the little village church of Paddington, must have yet remained. The interment, as all the world knows, took place in Chiswick Churchyard; a quiet funeral, with more tears than ostrich-plumes, more sorrow than black silk. It was not for some six or seven years after, that the sculptured tomb was erected, and Garrick and Johnson calmly discussed the wording of the epitaph. It is “no easy thing,” wrote the doctor. Time had something numbed their sense of loss when they sat down to exchange poetical criticism, though habit is overpowering; and it would have taken a good deal, at any time, to have disturbed Johnson from his wonted pose of reviewer; just as the dying sculptor in the story, receiving extreme unction from his priest, found time to complain of the mal-execution of the crucifix held to his lips. “Pictured morals,” he wrote, “is a beautiful expression, but learn and mourn cannot stand for rhymes. Art and Nature have been seen together too often. In the first stanza is feeling, in the second feel. If thou hast neither is quite prose, and prose of the familiar kind,” &c., &c.

William dead and buried, the window shutters reopened, and heaven’s glad light once more permitted to stream into the house, the red eyes of the household a little cooled and staunched, came the widow’s dreadful task of examining the property of the deceased, of picking up the fragment’sfragments [sic] that remained. How to live? Survivors have often to make that painful inquiry. There was little money in the house. The painter’s life had been hard-working enough; the labourer was willing, but the harvest was very scanty. Such a little art public! such low prices! The six “Marriage à la Mode” pictures were sold for one hundred and twenty guineas, including Carlo Maratti frames, that had cost the painter four guineas each. The eight “Rake’s Progress” pictures fetched twenty-two guineas each. The six “Harlot’s Progress,” fourteen guineas each. The “Strolling Players " went for twenty-six guineas! O purblind connoisseurs! Dullard dillettanti! Still there was something for the widow; not her wedding portion—that seems to have been long