HOGARTH HOUSE, GHISWICK 



William of Orange. Sutton Court, with all these historic memories, 

 has disappeared ; so, too, has the mansion belonging to the Pre- 

 bendal Manor. Close to it, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 

 as mentioned elsewhere, Gabriel Goodman, Dean of Westminster, 

 erected a house whither the masters and boys of Westminster 

 School might retire in times of the plague and sickness. Hither, 

 as we have seen, frequently came the awful Dr. Busby, who died in 

 1695, when nearly 90, and who for fifty-five years was Headmaster 

 at Westminster. But the use of College House, as the place came 

 to be called, as a sanatorium, ceased in 1733. Lysons tells us 

 that in 1810 it was a ladies' boarding-school. 



Corney House, associated with the Russell family, and visited by 

 Queen Elizabeth, another famous Chiswick residence, was pulled 

 down in 1832 ; but its beautiful gardens on the river side remained 

 until they were absorbed in the works of Messrs. Thornycroft, Of 

 the Mall I have already spoken in the chapter on " Walpole House." 



Sir Stephen Fox, founder of the fortunes of the Fox family, who, 

 when seventy-five years old, married, in Chiswick Church, a lady 

 fifty years his junior, built the Manor House and the " Manor House 

 Farm." The grounds of the Manor House, a residence for some time 

 occupied by Lady Mary Coke, were on her death incorporated by 

 the Duke of Devonshire in those of Chiswick House, and the house, as 

 we know, was pulled down ; but the Manor House Farm, a creeper- 

 covered mansion with dormer windows, existed for two hundred 

 years. All these fine houses gave distinction to the river-side 

 village at the period of the Hogarth settlement there when the 

 success of the " Marriage a la mode " had enhanced his fame as an 

 artist and a moralist. 



Hogarth House, the name by which Hogarth's country residence 

 is now known, is literally within a stone's-throw of the gates of Chis- 

 wick House, " the fine bijou," to use the eighteenth-century phrase, 

 described in an earlier chapter, which Richard Boyle, Earl of Bur- 

 lington, built to contain the precious works of art that he had 

 collected abroad. Together with the beautiful gardens laid out by 

 William Kent, and stocked Horace Walpole says overstocked 

 with classic statuary, terminal busts, sculptures, and so forth, it 

 was, as we know, well worth a day's journey to see. 



I do not think it at all likely, however, that Hogarth himself 

 had ever seen it. In earlier days he had cast too much ridicule on 



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