HOGARTH HOUSE, CHISWICK 
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~ 
231 
