HOGARTH 



HOGG 



James Street, Covent Garden. About 1720 he set 

 up for himself. His first employment was to engrave 

 coats of arms, crests, shop-bills, &c. , after which he 

 began to design plates for the booksellers, the chief 

 of which are the illustrations to Gray's edition of 

 Hudibras (1726). He next tried his hand at por- 

 trait-painting, and soon had ample employment for 

 what are called 'conversation pieces,' but he never 

 cared greatly for this branch of art. In March 1729 

 he married clandestinely the daughter of Sir James 

 Thornhill, and shortly afterwards began to display 

 his extraordinary faculty for depicting the vices and 

 follies of his time. In 1730-31 he painted 'A Har- 

 lot's Progress,' a series of six pictures which, like 

 many of his other works, was engraved by himself. 

 It was published in April 1732. The ' Harlot's 

 Progress was followed by other moral histories and 

 satiric delineations, such as 'A Midnight Modern 

 Conversation' (1734), 'Southwark Fair' (1735), 

 ' A Rake's Progress ' ( 1735 ), ' The Distressed Poet ' 

 (1736), 'The Four Times of the Day,' and the 

 'Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn' (1738). 

 Concurrently with these Hogarth made more than 

 one attempt to compete with the popular history- 

 painters of his day, and with far less success pro- 

 duced the large canvases still in St Bartholomew's 

 Hospital the ' Pool of Bethesda ' and the ' Good 

 Samaritan,' both executed in 1736; and he also 

 produced several portraits. The series of graphic 

 satires was, however, continued by the ' Enraged 

 Musician ' ( 1741 ) and the famous ' Marriage a la 

 Mode ' ( his masterpiece ), six pictures now in the 

 "National Gallery, and engraved by various hands 

 in 1745. 'Industry and Idleness,' twelve plates, 

 followed these in 1747 ; ' Calais Gate, or O the Roast 

 Beef of Old England !' ( 1749) came next, and in 1750 

 the fine plate known familiarly as the ' March to 

 Finchley.' The minor plates of 'Beer Street ' and 

 ' Gin Lane ' and the set called ' The Progress of 

 Cruelty ' belong to 1751. In 1752 he published the 

 Analysis of Beauty, a treatise containing many 

 shrewd remarks, but confused and illiterate in its 

 style. It had only a succes d'estime. After this he 

 returned to his graver, producing ( with the aid of 

 Grignion and others ) the four prints of the ' Election 

 Series' (1755-58), the 'Cockpit' (1759), and other 

 pieces. In 1757 he was appointed sergeant-painter 

 to the king. In 1762-63 an unhappy excursion into 

 politics involved him in a miserable quarrel with 

 Wilkes and Churchill, the result of which, on his 

 side, was the well-known portraits of Wilkes, and 

 of Churchill as a bear ( ' The Bruiser ' ). By this 

 time his health was failing. He composed a tail- 

 piece to his works, ' Finis, or the Bathos,' March 

 1764 ; and in October of the same year died at his 

 house in Leicester Fields. He was buried in Chis- 

 wick churchyard, under an epitaph by Garrick. 

 Not far off still stands the little villa which he 

 long occupied as a summer residence. 



There are portraits of Hogarth by himself in the 

 National and National Portrait Galleries, and most 

 of his pictures, which now enjoy a much higher 

 repute for technique than formerly, are preserved 

 in public or private collections in Britain. His 

 powers of invention and combination were extra- 

 ordinary ; and as a humorist and social satirist with 

 the pencil he has never been surpassed. There can 

 be no doubt also that he genuinely desired to assist 

 by his work in the reformation of manners. 



His prints can be studied in the collections of Boydell 

 (1790), or of Baldwin and Cradock (1820-22). Bio- 

 graphical studies of him have been published by G. A. 

 Sala ( 1866 )' and the present writer ( 1889-92 ). The best 

 commentaries on his engravings are to be found in John 

 Ireland's Hogarth Illustrated (1791-98); Lichtenberg's 

 Ausfiihrliche Erklarumj (revised edition, 1850-53); 

 Nichols and Steevens' Genuine Works (1808-17); and 

 F. G. Stephens' Catalogue of the Satirical Prints and 

 Drawings in the British Museum, vols. ii.-iv. 



Hogg, JAMES, Scottish poet, was born, in a 

 cottage near the parish church of Ettrick, Selkirk- 

 shire, in the year 1770. The exact date of his birth 

 is unknown ; and rather singularly he himself 

 asserted it to have been the 25th January 1772. It 

 is beyond question, however, that he was baptised 

 on 9th December 1770. He was the second son of 

 Robert Hogg, farmer and shepherd, by Margaret 

 Laidlaw, who was a distant relative of William 

 or ' Willie ' Laidlaw, the amanuensis of Sir Walter 

 Scott and author of ' Lucy's Flitting. ' Hogg's 

 education was conducted in a very irregular 

 fashion, owing to his being taken from school at 

 intervals to help his father in tending sheep. His 

 schooling according to his own statement 

 amounted in all to about six months ; he learned 

 to read the Bible, but not to write. Meanwhile, 

 however, his mother had filled his imagination 

 by telling him ' tales of kings, giants, knights, 

 fairies, kelpies, brownies, &c.' In the intervals 

 of work he seems to have educated himself, and 

 when he was about sixteen years of age a perusal 

 of The Gentle Shepherd and Life and Adventures 

 of Sir William Wallace kindled his poetical fancy. 

 Hogg himself says, however, that it was not till 

 1796 that he attempted to write verses, and ' for 

 several years his compositions consisted wholly of 

 songs and ballads, made up for the lasses to sing 

 in chorus.' In 1800 one of his poems, 'Donald 

 M'Donald,' having for its subject the threatened 

 invasion of Great Britain by the first Napoleon, 

 was published anonymously. The following year, 

 having visited Edinburgh to sell his employer's 

 sheep, he had printed in pamphlet form Scottish 

 Pastorals, Poems, Songs, &c. Of this small 

 volume a thousand copies were thrown off, but 

 no impression was made upon the public by it. 

 At this time Hogg contemplated emigration to 

 the island of Harris, and wrote a ' Farewell to- 

 Ettrick.' His scheme fell through, but he was 

 fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Sir 

 Walter Scott then Mr Scott, sheriff of Selkirk- 

 shire. Having written out several ballads from 

 his mother's recitation, he sent them to Scott, 

 who gave them a place in the third volume of his 

 Border Minstrelsy, which appeared in 1803. The 

 same year Constable, acting on Scott's advice, 

 published a volume of verse entitled The Moun- 

 tain Bard, and also a treatise of a different 

 kind entitled Hogg on Sheep. The two between 

 them brought him 300, which he sunk in a 

 farm that proved a total failure. After several 

 years of vicissitude, in which he tried, without 

 success, to run large stock farms, Hogg repaired to 

 Edinburgh and entered definitely on a literary 

 career. He published in 1810 a second volume of 

 poems, The Forest Minstrel, which proved a 

 failure, and started a weekly paper, The Spy, 

 which lasted for a few months. Meanwhile he 

 seems to have gone into business as a land-agent, 

 but here again to have met with no success. In 

 1813, however, he published his greatest work, 

 The Queen's Wake, and at once obtained cordial 

 recognition from the critics, Jeffrey declaring in 

 the Edinburgh Review that 'no doubt can be 

 entertained that he is a poet in the highest 

 acceptation of the term.' Hogg had made the 

 friendship of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, 

 and in accordance with her death-bed request 

 her husband granted him, on the payment of 

 a nominal rent, one of his farms known in- 

 differently as Mossend, Eltrive Lake, or Altrive. 

 Had he given himself up to this farm and to 

 literature Hogg would probably have been a well- 

 to-do as well as a happy man. But he hampered 

 himself by taking the neighbouring farm of Mount 

 Benger, and was more or less in pecuniary diffi- 

 culties to the end of his days. He was very happy,. 



