Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/202

 not the first? At any rate, you will grant the coincidence—won't you?—between the lad George Cruikshank and little boy Hogarth, toddling about Ship Court and perchance scrawling caricatures on the walls, exaggerating in rollicking chalk (I allow him as many brick walls as you like, but no slates) the Slawkenbergian nose of William the Deliverer, or adding abnormal curls to the vast wig of the detested clerical statesman, Burnet.

Little boy Hogarth is yet too young to see these things; but he may be at Gilbert Burnet's turbulent funeral yet. First, we must get him out of the Old Bailey, where he dwells for a good dozen years at least. Dominie Hogarth has the school upstairs, where he drums Lilly's Accidence, or perhaps his own Grammatical Disputations into his scholars. Of what order may these scholars have been? The gentry had long since left the Bailey; and you may start, perhaps, to be told that British Brahmins had ever inhabited that lowering precinct of the gallows, and parvyse of the press-room. Yet, in the Old Bailey stood Sydney House, a stately mansion built for the Sydneys, Earls of Leicester, and which they abandoned [circa 1660] for the genteeler locality of Leicester Fields. I don't know what Sydney House could have been like, or by whom it was inhabited when Hogarth was a little boy; but it was to all likelihood in a tumbledown, desolate condition. In Pennant's time it was a coachmaker's shop. The keeper of Newgate may have had children, too, for schooling, but his corporation connections would probably have insured his boy's admission to Christ's Hospital, or to Paul's, or Merchant Taylors' School, for the keeper of Newgate was then a somebody; and it was by times his privilege to entertain the sheriffs with sack and sugar. Dominie Hogarth's pupils must have been sons of substantial traders in the Bailey itself—where were many noted booksellers' shops—or from the adjacent Ludgate, whilom Bowyers Hill, and from Fleet Street, or, perchance, Aldersgate Street; which, not then purely commercial or shopkeeping, was the site of many imposing mansions superbly decorated within, formerly the property of the nobility, but then (1697) occupied by stately Turkey and Levant merchants. And to the dominie's may have come the offspring of the wealthy butchers of Newgate Market, whose rubicund meat-wives are libellously declared to have been in the habit of getting "over-taken by burnt sherry" by eight o'clock in the morning; and while in that jovial but prematurely matutinal condition, rivalling the flat-caps of the Dark House, Billingsgate, and the pease-pottage sellers of Baldwin's Gardens—to say nothing of the cake and comfit purveyors to the Finsbury archers—in voluble and abusive eloquence. Bonny dames were these butchers' wives; lusty, rotund, generous to the poor, loud, but cheery with their apprentices and journeymen, great (as now) in making fortunes for their beast-buying-and-killing husbands; radiant in gold-chains, earrings, and laced aprons, and tremendous at trades-feasts and civic junketings.

And I am yet in the year 1697, and in the Old Bailey with a child in my arms. Were this an honest plain-sailing biography, now, what would be easier for me than to skip the first twelve or thirteen years of the boy's