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 William Hogarth:

PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.

Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.

II.—

How often have I envied those who—were not my envy dead and buried—would now be sixty years old! I mean the persons who were born at the commencement of the present century, and who saw its glories evolved each year with a more astonishing grandeur and brilliance, till they culminated in that universal "transformation scene" of '15. For the appreciation of things began to dawn on me only in an era of internecine frays and feuds:—theological controversies, reform agitations, corporation squabbles, boroughmongering debates, and the like: a time of sad seditions and unwholesome social misunderstandings; Captain Rock shooting tithe-proctors in Ireland yonder; Captain Swing burning hayricks here; Captains Ignorance and Starvation wandering up and down, smashing machinery, demolishing toll-bars, screeching out "Bread or blood!" at the carriage-windows of the nobility and gentry going to the drawing-room, and otherwise proceeding the wretchedest of ways for the redress of their grievances. Surely, I thought, when I began to think at all, I was born in the worst of times. Could that stern nobleman, whom the mob hated, and hooted, and pelted—could the detested "Nosey," who was beset by a furious crowd in the Minories, and would have been torn off his horse, perchance slain, but for the timely aid of Chelsea Pensioners and City Marshal-*men,—and who was compelled to screen his palace windows with iron shutters from onslaughts of Radical macadamites—could he be that grand Duke Arthur, Conqueror and Captain, who had lived through so much glory, and had been so much adored an idol? Oh, to have been born in 1800! At six, I might just have remembered the mingled exultation and passionate grief of Trafalgar; have seen the lying in state at Greenwich, the great procession, and the trophied car that bore the mighty admiral's remains to his last home beneath the dome of Paul's. I might have heard of the crowning of the great usurper of Gaul: of his putting away his Creole wife, and taking an emperor's daughter; of his congress at Erfurt,—and Talma, his tragedian, playing to a pit full of kings of his triumphal march to Moscow, and dismal melting away—he and his hosts—therefrom; of his last defeat and spectral appearance among us—a wan, fat, captive man, in a battered cocked hat, on the poop of an English war-ship in Plymouth Sound—just before his transportation to the rock appointed to him to eat his heart upon. I envied the nurse who told upon her fingers the names of the famous victories of the British army under in Spain; Vimieira, Talavera, Vittoria, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Fuentes d'Onore,