HOGARTH HOUSE, GHISWIGK . 



chief victim of Hogarth's satiric humour. Yet why should Hogarth 

 have avoided Chiswick ? The satire in question had been published 

 a quarter of a century before Hogarth came to Chiswick, and his 

 burlesques, if pointed, were not venomous. Pope, who appears 

 never to have retaliated for the " Burlington Gate " affront, in 

 which he had been included, no doubt feeling that with so formid- 

 able an antagonist as Hogarth, silence was the wisest course 

 Pope was dead, and the remainder of the brilliant circle of which 

 Lord Burlington had been the centre, was melting away. He 

 himself had fallen on evil days, brought about chiefly by his own 

 splendid public spirit and hospitality ; possibly he was not even 

 aware of the presence of the stranger i.e., the painter at his 

 gates ; possibly he chose not to be ; anyway, I have come across 

 no record of his dealings with the artist. 



Hogarth, sturdily independent, would be loftily indifferent alike 

 to his noble neighbour's notice or disdain, and in his walks abroad 

 there was no danger of an encounter with Kent himself, either in 

 the flesh or in the spirit, for, unless the date given by the most 

 reliable authorities as that of Hogarth's settlement at Chiswick, be 

 incorrect, the man whose " oracle," says Horace Walpole, " was 

 so much consulted by all who affected taste, that nothing was 

 thought complete without his assistance," had two years earlier 

 gone the way of all men, whether geniuses or mediocrities, and had 

 been honourably interred by Lord Burlington, in the family vault 

 of the Boyles, in Chiswick Church. If, indeed, his unquiet ghost 

 walked at all, it would naturally do so at Westminster Abbey or 

 Kensington Palace, where his sins as an artist are most glaring and 

 still in evidence, rather than near the scene of his genuine successes. 



The " country box " to which Hogarth now came, is a mere slip 

 of a house nay, rather a cottage in dimensions bearing, indeed, 

 some sort of resemblance to a shallow box turned up on end and 

 divided into stories, and these again into rooms, and pierced in front 

 only in doll's-house fashion with windows. There is a large 

 overhanging bay above the front door, overlooking the garden ; it 

 is the window of what must have been Mrs. Hogarth's withdrawing- 

 room, where with her mother, widow of the late Sergeant-painter 

 to the King, and M.P. for Weymouth, and her cousin, Mary Lewis, 

 she entertained Mrs. Garrick, and other lady friends. Here they 

 sipped fine bohea out of handleless cups of delicate porcelain, dis- 



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