483 



HOGARTH, WILLIAM. 



HOGG, JAMES. 



451 



old ; and, according to Walpole, be attended Sir James ThornUill's 

 academy in St. Martin's-lane, where he " studied drawing from the 

 life, in which he never attained great excellence." His livelihood waa 

 earned by engraving arms, crests, ciphers, shop-bills, and other similar 

 works, until 1724, when he published his first original engraving, now 

 called the ' Small Masquerade Ticket, or Burlington Gate.' Illustra- 

 tions to Mortraye's 'Travels,' 'Hudibras,' and other books, were 

 supplied by him in 1725 and the following year, which, with the help 

 of gome small etchings of scenes of town life and folly, replenished 

 MR purse, and gained him a moderate reputation. He now paid his 

 addresses to Jane, daughter of Sir James Thornhill, to whom he was 

 united in 1730, without the consent of her parents. Her father 

 resented the marriage as a degradation to his daughter, and was not 

 reconciled to her until two years after it had taken place. The facility 

 which Hogarth had gained in the use of the brush now induced him 

 to attempt portrait-painting ; but although he was not unsuccessful in 

 the treatment of many of big subjects, the stylo did not satisfy his 

 mind : there was too much copying, as it were, and too little room for 

 ingenuity and invention, to compensate for the drudgery. He accord- 

 ingly abandoned portrait-painting, and entered upon that original 

 style on which his fame rests. " The reasons," he says, " which 

 induced me to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both 

 writers and painters had, in the historical style, totally overlooked 

 that intermediate species of subjects which may be placed between 

 the sublime and grotesque." 



Before he had done anything of much consequence in this walk he 

 entertained some hopes of succeeding in the higher branch of historical 

 painting. "He was not," says Sir Joshua Reynolds (' Discourses,' 

 vol. ii., p. 163), "blessed with the knowledge of his own deficiency, 

 or of the bounds which were set to the extent of his own powers." 

 "After he had invented a new species of dramatic painting, in which 

 probably he will never be equalled, and had stored hia mind with 

 infinite materials to explain and illustrate the domestic and familiar 

 scenes of comic life, which were generally and ought always to have 

 been the subject at his pencil, he very imprudently, or rather pre- 

 sumptuously, attempted the great historical style, for which his 

 previous habits had by no means prepared him." 



After this failure as an historical painter, he resumed bis former 

 manner, engraving, as bad been his custom, the pictures which be had 

 painted. The eager demand for these engravings induced tbe print- 

 sellers to pirate them ; and the piracies so diminished the profits of 

 the author that he applied to parliament for redress : in consequence 

 of his application a bill waa passed in 1735, granting a copyright of 

 a print for fourteen yean after its publication. The reputation of 

 Hogarth was now established, and he continued to paint with 

 undiuiinished ability. At the age of forty-eight he was in easy cir- 

 cumstances, and rich enough to keep a carriage. .The sale of bis 

 prints was his principal source of income : the price of hU pictures 

 kept pace neither with his fame nor with hia expectations. We find 

 that in 1745 be sold by auction nineteen pictures, including the 

 ' Harlot's and Rake's Progresses,' for 427/. 7*., a sum most unequal to 

 their merits. Some conditions which he had very whimsically annexed 

 to the sale appear to have diminished his profit*. In 1753 ho pub- 

 lished his ' Analysis of Beauty,' in which he attempted to prove that 

 tbe foundation of beauty and grace consists in a flowing serpentine 

 line : he cites numerous examples ; and though his conclusion is 

 unsound, his arguments are both amusing and ingenious. They were 

 attacked and ridiculed by a host of his envious contemporaries; but 

 the work was translated into French, Italian, and German. 



For an account of Hogarth's contests with Wilkes, the celebrated 

 politician, we must refer to his biographers. After bis sixty-sixth 

 year Hogarth's health began to decline, and he died on the 26th of 

 October 1764. He was buried in the churchyard at Chiswick, where 

 hia wife was also interred in 1789. They had no children. A monu- 

 ment inscribed with some verses by Garrick marks the site of the 

 great painter's grave : having become somewhat dilapidated it was 

 restored in 1856 by a namesake of the painter. 



Hogarth is tbe first English painter who can be said to have 

 acquired any name among foreigners : he is also one of the earliest 

 English painters who can be considered an original genius. His style 

 of painting may be characterised as the ' satirical ; ' the satire being 

 sometimes humorous and comic, sometimes grave, bitter, and tragic. 

 His subjects are chosen from common life, among all classes of society, 

 in his own country and in his own time. His comico-satirical vein 

 may be seen in the ' Enraged Musician,' the ' March to Finchley,' 

 'Beer Lane,' &c. : his tragico-satirical vein is exemplified in the ' Harlot's 

 Progress,' the ' Rake's Progress,' ' Gin Lane,' Ac. The scries of 

 ' Marriage a la Mode ' contains pictures in both these veins. In the 

 latter style his works are analogous to those of Swift He also 

 resembles Juvenal, in unmercifully chastising and laying bare the 

 vices and weaknesses of mankind. The exaggeration of salient pecu- 

 liarities!, and the accumulation of characteristic incidents, which are 

 conspicuous in the works of Hogarth, properly place him in tbe rank 

 of caricnturitti. At the same time, he never departs so widely from 

 nature as to mar the effect of his composition. To such an extent is 

 he a caricaturist, that he has been said to write rather than paint with 

 the brush. Although caricature, as its name imports, originated 

 among the Italians, Hogarth must be considered aa the great master 



of this style. But the great merit of Hogarth's pictures is that they 

 have a serious purpose, and that every part, and every object almost, 

 in each picture, whether the picture be an independent one, or one 

 of a series, subserves that purpose. Further it must be remarked 

 what is too often overlooked in regarding the genius of Hogarth 

 that bis pictures are in the strictest sense original. For neither 

 subject nor suggestion is he indebted to any other writer or painter. 

 Story, character, and treatment are alike entirely his own. Hia 

 invention is unbounded, and every part of hia picture, whatever bo 

 the subject, teems witli moaning ; and, what is a prime virtue in a 

 moral satirist, the meaning is always perfectly clear. 



Concerning the merits of Hogarth's technical execution, there has 

 been some difference of opinion. As to the excellency of his drawing 

 and composition there can, we presume, be no doubt in the mind of 

 those who have seeu his original pictures. On this subject generally, 

 we quote the opinion of Dr. Waagen respecting the series of ' Marriage 

 a la Mode,' whose high authority we consider altogether decisive. 

 " What surprises me," he says, " ia the eminent merit of these works 

 as paintings, since Hogarth's own countryman Hoi-ace Walpole says 

 he had but little merit as a painter. All the most delicate shades of 

 his humour are here marked in his heads with consummate skill and 

 freedom, and every other part executed with the same decision, and 

 for tho most part with care. Though the colouring on the whole is 

 weak, and the pictures, being painted in dead colours with hardly 

 any glazing, have more the look of water-colour than of oil-paintings, 

 yet the colouring of the flesh is often powerful, and the other colours 

 are disposed with so much refined feeling for harmonious effect, that 

 in this respect these pictures stand in a far higher rank than many of 

 the productions of the modern English school, with its glaring inhar- 

 monious colours." (Waagen, ' Arts and Artists in England,' German 

 edit., vol. i., p. 230.) Hogarth appears to have avoided high colouring, 

 lest the attention of the spectator should be distracted from the 

 subject of the picture. In the National Gallery there are seven of 

 his pictures, consisting of his own portrait and the series of the 

 ' Marriage a la Mode.' 



HOGG, JAMES, commonly called the Ettrick Shepherd, was born 

 hi the forest of Ettrick in Selkirkshire in 1772, and, as he latterly 

 insisted, on tho 25th of January, the birthday of the poet Burns, 

 although that date appears to have been opposed both to his own 

 previous statements aud to other evidence. His forefathers had beeu 

 shepherds for many generations, aud although his father, Robert Hogg, 

 at one time took a lease of two farms and began business as a dealer 

 in sheep, the speculation proved unfortunate, and he was compelled to 

 fall back to his original condition, in which also bis son James aud 

 three brothers were all brought up. Hogg was fond of giving himself 

 out as nearly altogether self-educated; he has stated that all tho 

 instruction he ever received was from being two or three winters at 

 school before be had completed his eighth year; but there is reason 

 to believe that in this particular also his account of himself is to be 

 regarded as somewhat poetical. He first began, he tells us, to be 

 known as a maker of songs among the rustic population of bis native 

 district in 1796, at which time he was a shepherd in the service of 

 Mr. Laidlaw of Blackhouse. Here we have auotber coincidence, for 

 that was the very year in which Burns died. The first of bia pro- 

 ductions that was printed appeared anonymously in 1801, his song of 

 ' Donald MacDonald,' a patriotic effusion on the subject of tbe 

 threatened French invasion, which immediately became a great popular 

 favourite in Scotland. Soon after, having gone to Edinburgh to sell 

 his master's sheep, he gratified his vanity by getting 1000 copies 

 thrown off of a small collection of his verses, which however ho was 

 afterwards very sorry he had allowed to see the light. 



It was in the summer of 1801, while he was still with Mr. Laidlaw, 

 that he was discovered by Sir Walter Scott, then engaged in collecting 

 materials for his ' Minstrelsy of tbe Scottish Border.' Hogg contributed 

 a number of old songs or ballads, which he had collected from the reci- 

 tation of persons in the forest, to the third volume of the ' Minstrelsy,' 

 which was published in 1 803. That year another collection of his poems, 

 f much superior merit to the former, was published at Edinburgh, 

 under the title of the 'Mountain Bard,' tbe proceeds of which, with 

 two prizes he got from tho Highland Society for essays on the rearing 

 and management of sheep, put him in possession of about 300/. With 

 this money he took a farm, which soon turned out a ruiuous concern. 

 For some time he attempted without success to get employment again 

 as a shepherd, and at last, in February 1810, "in utter desperation," 

 he says, " I took my plaid about my shoulders, determined, since no 

 better could be, to push my fortune as a literary man." This was the 

 commencement of a life of busy authorship, which may be said to have 

 lasted till his death, although in 1814, after having married, be returned 

 to the country to live on a farm given to him by the Duke of Buccleuch, 

 which soon however, under his management, came to yield aa litUe 

 profit to the occupier as rent to the proprietor. We cannot enter into 

 tho long history of his varied but constantly-struggling life, marked 

 as it was by much more than the usual share of fluctuation and 

 casualty, and by many curious passages arising out of his transactions 

 with the booksellers and hia intercourse with some of his distinguished 

 literary contemporaries. Ho has prefixed a full memoir of his own 

 life to an edition of bis ' Mountain Bard,' published in 1821 ; and 

 many fragments of autobiography are to be found scattered up aud 



