GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
cussing the taste of the town in the latest modes, comparing 
embroidery, and the samplers they were working, and maybe talking 
a little scandal too, to give flavour to the tea. Below, in the oak- 
_panelled parlour, seated on either side of the wide fireplace in- 
chairs that may be seen at Hogarth House to-day, Hogarth and 
‘“‘ Little David ’’ talked and joked, and at intervals puffed at their 
long clay pipes. Fielding, even then in failing health, might 
sometimes have been present, and possibly Wilkes, for as yet there 
was no quarrel. 
The affection between Hogarth and Garrick was very real, and 
we know how the actor wrote to Churchill the poet, when the 
latter was meditating the slashing attack, that, associated with 
Wilkes’s, he delighted to think helped largely to bring Hogarth to 
his grave. He entreated him to refrain, for he said, speaking of 
the painter, ‘“‘ He is a great and original genius; I love him as 
a man, and reverence him as an artist,’ which I take to be 
as fine a panegyric as that afterwards written upon his friend’s 
tombstone. . 
Hogarth, it will be remembered, some twenty years earlier, had 
run away with Sir James Thornhill’s only daughter. The knight 
had contrived to make a considerable fortune, even although, 
according to Walpole, he received only forty shillings a square 
yard for painting the cupola of St. Paul’s, and twenty-five shillings 
a yard, for the hall at Blenheim. Angry at first, he rather quickly 
forgave the young couple, for Hogarth, at the time of his marriage, 
had just made his mark with ‘‘ The Harlot’s Progress ;” and, with 
his conversation-groups of small family portraits, was making a 
competency. Thornhill lived long enough to rejoice in the begin- 
nings of his son-in-law’s fame, to recognize his genius, and to 
acknowledge that his pretty daughter had not made a bad match, 
after all. The union proved a very happy one; Jane made the 
painter an excellent wife. But her father died fifteen years before 
they came to Chiswick, where Mrs. Hogarth continued mostly to 
live after her famous husband’s death. He left her his house at 
Chiswick, and all his other property, consisting chiefly of his: 
engraved copper-plates. One is glad to know that, by a special 
Act of Parliament, the copyright of these was secured to her for a 
considerable number of years, and that, when the sale of the prints 
gradually decreased, the Royal Academy, at the instance of the 
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