HOGARTH HOUSE, GHISWIGK 



King, had bestowed upon her a pension of forty pounds. She 

 could not have been at all wealthy, and the carriage was probably 

 soon given up ; but she kept up her dignity, and, accompanied by 

 a relation, who was probably Mary Lewis, to whom she leCt her 

 property, she was long wheeled to the parish church in a bath-chair, 

 attended by her grey-headed man-servant Samuel, who walked 

 before her carrying her books up the aisle. Sir Richard Phillips 

 had vivid recollections of seeing her on these occasions ; he was a 

 boy at the time, but recalls the stately air with which, carrying a 

 cane, she sailed up the church in her silken sacque, high head-dress, 

 and black whaleboned hood, being locked in her pew by her 

 dependant. 



Living as they did for the greater part of their lives, in the city, 

 the attraction that drew Hogarth and his wife to Chiswick was 

 probably the garden, which in their day, according to Mary Lewis, 

 44 Was laid out in good style." It was then in the midst of fields ; 

 it is now nearly built up by small, shabby houses and fifth-rate 

 streets. Factories, steam laundries, and large board-schools, turn- 

 ing out daily hundreds of noisy children, steam-whistles and 

 buzzards, screaming out the hour for the factory hands to assemble 

 or disperse, the cries of the cats'-meat man, and of costermongers 

 many of these unintelligible to the uninitiated ear, disturb the 

 otherwise sunny silence of the place, and have destroyed the peace 

 that must have reigned there two hundred and fifty years ago. 



Thanks to the public-spiritedness and munificence of Lieutenant- 

 Colonel Shipway, of Chiswick, who in 1902 purchased the house 

 and garden, and presented them to the Middlesex County Council 

 in trust for the nation the place where the most individual and 

 original of British artists, and one of the most distinguished of 

 moralists and teachers, spent his summers, is saved from actual 

 desecration. The slums can no farther encroach upon the sacred 

 privacy of the former haunts of genius. So far as is possible, the 

 garden is still " laid out in good style." The beautiful old brick 

 wall to the left of my picture, is high enough to shut out the ugly 

 street on its outer side, and the old vine still clings to it in places. 

 The Filbert Walk, of which one reads, has gone, but the path 

 remains, lined by plane trees which lend a grateful shade in what 

 Carlyle called the " July blazes." Hogarth's country studio, at 

 its lower end, has been absorbed in the surrounding buildings ; 



233 



