Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/22

. 29, 1861.] ago melted away. Sir James Thornhill had been forgiving, kind, and generous after a time—two years—and opened to the runaway lovers his heart and his purse. But there was little to show for all that now. There hung on the walls various works of the dead hand. Portraits of the Miss Hogarths, the painter’s sisters; they kept a ready-made clothes shop at Little Britain gate. Portraits of the daughter of Mr. Rich, the comedian; of Sir James and Lady Thornhill; of the six servants; and his own likeness, with his bull-dog and palette; besides these there was the great effort, “Bill Hogarth’s ‘Sigismunda,’ not to be sold under £500;” so he had enjoined. Alas! who would give it? (At the sale after the widow’s death it was knocked down to Alderman Boydell, for fifty guineas!) Indeed, it would be very hard to sell all these; and she did not. She clung to the precious relics till death relaxed her grasp, when the auctioneer’s hammer made short work of the painter’s remains, even to his maul-stick. But to live? There were seventy-two plates, with the copyrights, secured to her for twenty years by Act of Parliament. These were hers absolutely under her husband’s will. Here at least was subsistence; indeed, the sale of prints from the plates produced, for a time, a respectable income. And then, too, there was the gold ticket of admission to Vauxhall Gardens (for the admission of six persons, or “one coach”), presented by the proprietor in his gratitude for the designs of the “Four Parts of the Day” (copied by Hayman), and the two scenes of “Evening,” and “Night,” with representations of Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn.

And the house at Chiswick was a possession of Hogarth’s. It was not then choked up with buildings, but stood cosy and secluded in its well-stored garden of walnut, mulberry, and apple trees, with the head-stones to the poor fellow’s pets—the bullfinch and dog Dick, who died the same year as his master; and a very old mulberry tree, stricken by lightning, and only held together by the iron braces made by his directions, perhaps applied with his own hands. How full of memorials of the dead painter! Pen-and-ink sketches on the panels of the wainscoted room on the ground floor; and the painting-room over the stables, with its large window, probably one of his improvements on first taking the house, looking on to the pleasant garden below. Doubtless the widow locked up the painting-room, and kept the key on the ring at her girdle. Years after, Sir Richard Phillips jotted down his memories of Chiswick—how he, a schoolboy then with his eyes just above the pew door, the bells in the old tower chiming for church, watched “Widow Hogarth and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle, draped in their silken sacks, their raised head-dresses, their black calashes, their lace ruffles, and their high crooked canes, preceded by their aged servant Samuel: who after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew.” State and dignity still remained to the widow; and there, up in the organ loft, was the quaint group of choristers whom Hogarth had so admirably sketched, led by the Sexton Mortefee, grimacing dreadfully as he leads on his terrible band to discord. A square, ugly church enough, with the great Devonshire pew—a small parlour with the roof off—half blocking up the chancel, a thing to be forgiven then, for the lovely Duchess sat there, and the sight of her angel head was surely enough to give new zest to the congregation’s prayers and praises. A church such as Hogarth often drew, with its “three-decker” arrangement of pulpits, the clerk, the reader, and the preacher, rising one above the other, and, top of all, one of those old regulation massive, carved sounding-boards, which gave so queer a Jack-in-the-box notion to the pulpit, that dreamers in dreary sermons, heedless of George Herbert’s counsel that if nothing else the sermon “preacheth patience,” could not but speculate on cutting off the bar that supported the board, letting it fall, and so, as it were, by one process bottling up both preacher and preaching.

The house in Leicester Fields also remained: the house on the east side of the square, called the “Golden Head,” with its sign cut by Hogarth himself from pieces of cork glued together, and gilded over. He often took his evening walk in the enclosure in his scarlet roquelaire and cocked hat, now and then, no doubt, casting admiring glances at his gaudy emblem. The Fields were only just merging into the Square. We learn that in 1745, the streets were so thinly built in the neighbourhood, that “when the heads of the Scottish rebels were placed on Temple Bar, a man stood in Leicester Fields, with a telescope, to give persons a sight of them for a halfpenny a-piece.” Just as we are offered a view of Saturn’s rings from Charing Cross! Hogarth’s house now forms part of a French hotel. The lean French cook, staggering under the roast beef in the “Gates of Calais” picture has been amply revenged. The fumes of French ragouts incessantly rise, on the site where the cruel caricature was drawn.

It is hard to say when the widow’s income first began to droop—when the demand for William Hogarth’s prints slackened. They circulated largely, but their price was never high. The eight prints of the “Rake’s Progress” could be purchased at Mrs. Hogarth’s house, in Leicester Fields, for one guinea; “Lord Lovat,” “Beer Street,” and “Gin Lane” for a shilling each only, and all the others could be obtained upon like easy terms. It cannot be told when the bill first appeared in Widow Hogarth’s window—“Lodgings to Let.” But eight years after William’s death there was certainly a lodger in the house in Leicester Fields—a lodger who could exclaim, “I also am a painter!”

Alexander Runciman was born in Edinburgh, in 1736. His father an architect, of course the baby soon began to play with the parental pencils. That is not remarkable—but he evidenced rather more ability than the average baby artist. At twelve he was out in the fields with paints and brushes, filling a sketch-book with unripe counterfeits of rocks, clouds, trees and water; at fourteen he was a student under John Norris, whom it pleased the period to regard as an eminent