Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/294

 tiny spirals of gold and silver curl away from the trenchant tool, and there is precious ullage in chasing and burnishing—spirals and ullage worth money in the market. Ask the Jews in Duke's Place, who sweat the guineas in horsehair bags, and clip the Jacobuses, and rasp the new-milled money with tiny files, if there be not profit to be had from the minutest surplusage of gold and silver.

Goldsmiths and silversmiths were proud folk. They pointed to George Heriot, King James's friend, and the great things he did. They pointed to the peerage. Did not a Duke of Beaufort, in 1683, marry a daughter of Sir Josiah Child, goldsmith and banker? Was not Earl Tylney, his son, half-brother to Dame Elizabeth Howland, mother of a Duchess of Bedford, one of whose daughters married the Duke of Bridgewater, another, the Earl of Essex? Was not Sir William Ward, goldsmith, father to Humble Ward, created Baron Ward by Charles I.? and from him springs there not the present Lord Dudley and Ward? O you grand people who came over with the Conqueror, where would you be now without your snug city marriages, your comfortable alliances with Cornhill and Chepe? Leigh of Stoneleigh comes from a lord mayor of Queen Bess's time. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, married an alderman's daughter two years ere Hogarth was apprenticed. The ancestor to the Lords Clifton was agent to the London Adventurers in Oliver's time, and acquired his estate in their service. George the Second's Earl of Rockingham married the daughter of Sir Henry Furnese, the money-lender and stock-jobber. The great Duke of Argyll and Greenwich married a lord mayor's niece. The Earl of Denbigh's ancestor married the daughter of Basil Firebrace, the wine merchant. Brewers, money-scriveners, Turkey merchants, Burgomasters of Utrecht's daughters,—all these married blithely into the haute pairie. If I am wrong in my genealogies, 'tis Daniel Defoe who is to blame, not I; for that immortal drudge of literature is my informant. Of course such marriages never take place now. Alliances between the sacs et parchemins are never heard of. Mayfair never meets the Mansion House, nor Botolph Lane Belgravia, save at a Ninth of November banquet. I question if I am not inopportune, and impertinent even, in hinting at the dukes and belted earls who married the rich citizens' daughters, were it not that by and by 'prentice Hogarth will paint some scenes from a great life drama full of Warton's [Greek: ETHOS], called Marriage à la Mode. Ah! those two perspectives seen through the open windows! In the first, the courtyard of the proud noble's mansion; in the last, busy, mercantile London Bridge: court and city, city and court, and which the saddest picture!

Dominie Hogarth had but a hard time of it, and must have been pinched in a gruesome manner to make both ends meet. That dictionary of his, painfully compiled, and at last with infinite care and labour completed, brought no grist to the mill in Ship Court. The manuscript