Part 10

The intervals are filled up by a pavior, who to every stroke of his rammer adds a loud, distinct, and echoing "Haugh!" The pedestrian cutler is grinding a butcher's cleaver with such earnestness and force, that it elicits sparks of fire. This, added to the agonizing howls of his unfortunate dog, must afford a perfect specimen of the ancient chromatic. The poor animal,[129] between a man and a monkey, piping harsh discords upon a hautboy, the girl whirling her _crepitaculum_, or rattle, and the boy beating his drum, conclude the catalogue of this harmonious band.

Thus much we may be almost said to hear; and we see, by the flag displayed at the church, that the fanciers of corals for grown gentlemen are performing a round of double bob-majors in the belfry. "John Long, pewterer," is inscribed over a door, and intimates the business going on in the house, where the strokes of some thirty or forty hammers ringing incessantly upon pewter, produce a sound more sonorous than that which is echoed from the forge of Vulcan.

This delineation originated in a story which was told to Hogarth by the late Mr. John Festin,[130] who is the hero of the print. He was eminent for his skill in playing upon the German flute and hautboy, and much employed as a teacher of music. To each of his scholars he devoted one hour each day. "At nine o'clock in the morning," said he, "I once waited upon my Lord Spencer; but his lordship being out of town, from him I went to Mr. V----n, now Lord V----n. It was so early, that he was not arisen. I went into his chamber, and, opening a shutter, sat down in the window-seat. Before the rails was a fellow playing upon the hautboy. A man with a barrow full of onions offered the piper an onion if he would play him a tune. That ended, he offered a second onion for a second tune; the same for a third, and was going on: but this was too much,--I could not bear it,--it angered my very soul--'Zounds!' said I, 'stop here! This fellow is ridiculing my profession--he is playing on the hautboy for onions!'"

The whole of this _bravura_ scene is admirably represented. A person quaintly enough observed that it deafens one to look at it.

The roar of the fisherman, with one hand so placed as to become a sort of sounding-board, and give reverberation, is admirably depicted. You perceive that he has, professionally speaking, not merely a _volume_, but a _folio volume_ of voice. As well as that of the dustman, it is a thorough bass; and, added to the tenor and treble of the other performers, must form a concert, though not quite so harmonious, yet nearly as loud, as those which have been graced with the royal presence in Westminster Abbey.

The scene seems to be taken from the lower part of St. Martin's Lane; it is certainly intended to represent the steeple of St. Martin's Church.

A heap of bricks, scientifically piled up close to the little girl, have been said to be a contrivance of some boy to catch birds. Is it not more likely that the modern architecture of this little Babel, as well as the adjoining plantation and pond, originated in the united efforts of the young lady and young gentleman in a corner cap? The latter has been dragging a slate fastened to a string, and tied round his waist, over a rough pavement, that he also might make _a pretty noise_.

A play-bill on the wall describes the unaccountable run of that very popular and pernicious performance, _The Beggar's Opera_, to have been sixty-two nights. In a copy of this opera, published in 1729, the _dramatis personæ_ are printed as here written; and the good fortune which followed Miss Fenton's attractions in Polly are universally known.

The figures are well grouped and judiciously characterized: those in the background have great force; but the boy with a drum is ill drawn, and the milk-pail is too large.

In the _London Daily Post_ for November 24, 1740, is the following advertisement:--"Shortly will be published, a new print, called _The Provoked Musician_, designed and engraved by Mr. William Hogarth; being a companion to a print representing a Distressed Poet, published some time since. To which will be added, a third on painting, which will complete the set; but as this subject may turn upon an affair depending between the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor and the author, it may be retarded for some time."

Humphry Parsons was at that time Lord Mayor; but the business alluded to not being in the city records, must remain obscure until some one who knows more about it than I do shall explain it.

In Dr. Beattie's _Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition_, quarto edition, p. 608, speaking of the modes of combination by which incongruous qualities may be presented to the eye or the fancy, so as to provoke laughter, he observes, that "this extraordinary group form a very comical mixture of incongruity and relation: of incongruity, owing to the dissimilar employment and appearances of the several persons, and to the variety of dissonance of their respective noises; and of relation, owing to their being all united in the same place, and for the same purpose of tormenting the poor fiddler. From the various sounds co-operating to this one end, the piece becomes more laughable than if their meeting were conceived to be without any particular destination; for the greater number of relations, as well as of contrarieties, that take place in any ludicrous assembly, the more ludicrous it will generally appear. Yet though this group comprehends not any mixture of meanness and dignity, it would, I think, be allowed to be laughable to a certain degree, merely from the juxtaposition of the objects, even though it were supposed to be accidental."

Of the immense fortunes realized by the Italian professors of music, we have many examples in this island; but the success of Lully, in France, was greater than any of his countrymen ever experienced here. He was by birth a Florentine. By his fiddle and his impudence, he raised himself from the Queen of France's kitchen to be chief of the band of music, and carried the art to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown in that kingdom. Louis XIV. gave him letters of nobility, and on his account enacted that the profession of music should consist with the quality of a gentleman. He died by excessive drinking, and left an immense fortune. The nobleman who had entertained him when he drank what proved his _quietus_, paying him a visit, "Ah! my lord," said his wife, with a deep sigh, "you are the last who made my husband drunk." Lully, who was dying, heard the remark, and had just voice enough left to add, "He shall be the first who makes me so again, when I get upon my legs!"

THE FOUR TIMES OF THE DAY.

In the "Progress of an Harlot," and the "Adventures of a Rake," Mr. Hogarth displayed his powers of painting history. Holding the mirror up to Nature, he shows

"Virtue her own feature, Vice her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

Had he exhibited no other specimen of his art, these fourteen prints would have given him a right to the title of a moral painter; and thus was he denominated by the late Mr. Fielding, in his _Adventures of Joseph Andrews_.

In the series before us he treads poetic ground. A description of the day, particularly the morning, has been generally deemed the bard's peculiar province. Considering Homer as the father of poesy, the whole family of Apollo have echoed his notes, and run their divisions of fancy upon his scale. With one of them,

"The morn, wak'd by the circling hours, Unbars the gates of light."

With another, she "sows the earth with orient pearl." At one time, with a star as her gentleman usher, she

"Draws night's humid curtains, and proclaims The new-born day forth dawning from the east;"

is now the grey Aurora, then the meek-ey'd morn, array'd in a dewy robe, with saffron streamers, placed in a glittering chariot, and drawn by etherial coursers, where, holding the reins with her red hands, _she drives the day_.

These heathenish descriptions may be very beautiful in their way; but hear our own Shakspeare:

"Night's tapers are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain's top."

Again:

"The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And 'gins to pale her ineffectual fire."

This comes home to all men's business and bosoms: it is picturesque, it is poetical; it is intelligible to the peasant or the philosopher, to the classic admirer of ancient mythology, or the man who never heard that the gates which Aurora unbars are made of the purest crystal.

The pictures drawn by Homer, and those feeble imitators who debase his splendid images by the mixture of their own dross, have their scenes laid in the country; but Hogarth has represented his _dramatis personæ_ in the centre of a great city. Had the learned author of _Hudibras_ been a painter, I believe he would have done the same. It will not be easy to select two lines that have more wit than his description of the morning:

"Now, like a lobster boil'd, the morn From black to red began to turn."

This is appropriate to either city or country.

In Mr. Hogarth's "Four Times of the Day" there is only one scene laid out of town; and that may, I think, be properly enough called a London pastoral, for it is at the pleasant village of Islington. The three others are described as in the most public parts of the metropolis, and exhibit a picture which will give a very correct idea of the dresses and pursuits of the inhabitants of London in the year 1738.

MORNING.

"Keen blows the blast, and eager is the air; With flakes of feather'd snow the ground is spread; To step, with mincing pace, to early prayer, Our clay-cold vestal leaves her downy bed. * * * * * And here the reeling sons of Riot see, After a night of senseless revelry. * * * * * Poor,--trembling,--old,--her suit the beggar plies; But _frozen chastity_ the little boon denies."--E.

This withered representative of Miss Bridget Alworthy, with a shivering footboy carrying her prayer-book, never fails in her attendance at morning service. She is a symbol of the season,

"Chaste as the icicle That's curdled by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple,"

she looks with scowling eye, and all the conscious pride of severe and stubborn virginity, on the poor girls who are suffering the embraces of two drunken beaux that are just staggered out of Tom King's Coffeehouse. One of them, from the basket on her arm, I conjecture to be an orange girl: she shows no displeasure at the boisterous salute of her Hibernian lover. That the hero in a laced hat is from the banks of the Shannon, is apparent in his countenance. The female whose face is partly concealed, and whose neck has a more easy turn than we always see in the works of this artist, is not formed of the most inflexible materials.

An old woman, seated upon a basket; the girl, warming her hands by a few withered sticks that are blazing on the ground; and a wretched mendicant,[131] wrapped in a tattered and party-coloured blanket, entreating charity from the rosy-fingered vestal who is going to church, complete the group. Behind them, at the door of Tom King's Coffeehouse, are a party engaged in a fray likely to create business for both surgeon and magistrate; we discover swords and cudgels in the combatants' hands.

On the opposite side of the print are two little schoolboys. That they have shining morning faces we cannot positively assert, but each has a satchel at his back, and, according with the description given by the poet of nature, is

"Creeping like snail unwillingly to school."

The lantern appended to the woman who has a basket on her head, proves that these dispensers of the riches of Pomona rise before the sun, and do part of their business by an artificial light. Near her, that immediate descendant of Paracelsus, Doctor Rock,[132] is expatiating to an admiring audience on the never-failing virtues of his wonder-working medicines. One hand holds a bottle of his miraculous panacea, and the other supports a board, on which is the king's arms, to indicate that his practice is sanctioned by royal letters patent. Two porringers and a spoon, placed on the bottom of an inverted basket, intimate that the woman seated near them is a vendor of rice-milk, which was at that time brought into the market every morning.

A fatigued porter leans on a rail; and a blind beggar is going towards the church: but whether he will become one of the congregation, or take his stand at the door, in the hope that religion may have warmed the hearts of its votaries to "pity the sorrows of a poor blind man," is uncertain.

The clock in the front of Inigo Jones' barn has the motto, "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI." Had Mr. Hervey of Weston Favel written upon the works of Hogarth, he would have expatiated for ten pages upon the relation which this motto has to the smoke which is issuing from the chimney beneath; he would have written about it, and about it, and told his readers that the glory of this world is typified by the smoke, and like the smoke it passeth away; that man himself is a mere vapour, etc. etc. etc.

Snow on the ground, and icicles hanging from the pent-house, exhibit a very chilling prospect; but, to dissipate the cold, there is happily a shop where spirituous liquors are sold _pro bono publico_, at a very little distance. A large pewter measure is placed upon a post before the door, and three of a smaller size hung over the window of the house.

The character of the principal figure[133] is admirably delineated. She is marked with that prim and awkward formality which generally accompanies her order, and is an exact type of a hard winter; for every part of her dress, except the flying lappets and apron, ruffled by the wind, is as rigidly precise as if it were frozen. Extreme cold is very well expressed in the slipshod footboy,[134] and the girl who is warming her hands. The group of which she is a part is well formed, but not sufficiently balanced on the opposite side.

The church dial, a few minutes before seven; marks of little shoes and pattens in the snow; and various productions of the season in the market, are an additional proof of that minute accuracy with which this artist inspected and represented objects which painters in general have neglected.

Covent Garden is the scene, but in the print every building is reversed.[135] This was a common error with Hogarth; not from his being ignorant of the use of the mirror, but from his considering it as a matter of little consequence.

The propriety of exhibiting a scene of riot in Tom King's Coffeehouse is proved by the following quotation from the _Weekly Miscellany_ for June 9, 1739:--"_Monday_, Mrs. Mary King, of Covent Garden, was brought up to the King's Bench bar, at Westminster, and received the following sentence for keeping a disorderly house, viz. to pay a fine of two hundred pounds, to suffer three months' imprisonment, to find security for her good behaviour for three years, and to remain in prison till the fine be paid." When her imprisonment ended, she retired from trade, built three houses on Haverstock Hill, near Hampstead, and in one of them, on the 10th of September 1747, she died. Her mansion was afterwards the residence of Nancy Dawson, and with the two others constitutes what is still distinguished by the appellation of Moll King's Row.

NOON.

"Hail, Gallia's daughters! easy, brisk, and free; Good-humour'd, _debonnaire_, and _degagée_: Though still fantastic, frivolous, and vain, Let not their airs and graces give us pain: Or fair, or brown, at toilet, prayer, or play, Their motto speaks their manners,--'_Toujours gai_.' But for that powder'd compound of grimace, That capering he-she thing of fringe and lace; With sword and cane, with bag and solitaire, Vain of the full-dress'd dwarf,--his hopeful heir, How does our spleen and indignation rise, When such a tinsell'd coxcomb meets our eyes, So twisted out of God and Nature's plan,-- Yet know that coxcomb must be call'd a man!"--E.

Among the figures who are coming out of church, an affected, flighty Frenchwoman, with her fluttering fop of an husband, and a boy, habited _à-la-mode de Paris_, claim our first attention. In dress, air, and manner, they have a national character. The whole congregation, whether male or female, old or young, carry the air of their country in countenance, dress, and deportment. Like the three principal figures, they are all marked with some affected peculiarity. Affectation in a woman is supportable upon no other ground than that general indulgence we pay to the omnipotence of beauty, which in a degree sanctifies whatever it adopts. In a boy, when we consider that the poor fellow is attempting to copy what he has been taught to believe praiseworthy, we laugh at it--the largest portion of ridicule falls upon his tutors; but in a man, it is contemptible!

The old fellow in a black periwig has a most vinegar-like aspect, and looks with great contempt at the frippery gentlewoman immediately before him. The woman with a demure countenance seems very piously considering how she can contrive to pick the embroidered beau's pocket. Two old sibyls joining their withered lips in a chaste salute, is nauseous enough, but, being a national custom, must be forgiven. The divine seems to have resided in this kingdom long enough to acquire a roast-beef countenance. A little boy, whose woollen night-cap is pressed over a most venerable flowing periwig, and the decrepid old man, leaning upon a crutch-stick, who is walking before him, I once considered as two vile caricatures, out of nature, and unworthy the artist. Since I have seen the peasantry of Flanders and the plebeian youth of France, I have in some degree changed my opinion, but still think them rather _outré_.

Under a sign of the Baptist's Head is written, "Good Eating;" and on each side of the inscription is a mutton chop. In opposition to this head without a body, unaccountably displayed as a sign at an eating-house, there is a body without a head, hanging out as the sign of a distiller's. This, by common consent, has been quaintly denominated "The Good Woman."[136] At a window above, one of the _softer sex_ proves her indisputable right to the title by her temperate conduct to her husband, with whom having had a little disagreement, she throws their Sunday's dinner into the street.

A girl, bringing a pie from the bakehouse, is stopped in her career by the rude embraces of a blackamoor, who eagerly rubs his sable visage against her blooming cheek.

Good eating is carried on to the lower part of the picture. A boy,[137] placing a baked pudding upon a post with rather too violent an action, the dish breaks, the fragments fall to the ground; and while he is loudly lamenting his misfortune, and with tears anticipating his punishment, the smoking remnants are eagerly snatched up by a poor girl. Not educated according to the system of Jean Jacques Rousseau, she feels no qualms of conscience about the original proprietor, and destitute of that fastidious delicacy which destroys the relish of many a fine lady, eagerly swallows the hot and delicious morsels with all the concomitants.

The scene is laid at the door of a French chapel in Hog Lane,--a part of the town at that time almost wholly peopled by French refugees or their descendants.

A kite blown from an adjacent field,[138] being entangled on the roof of the chapel, hangs pendant on the wall. One of Mr. Hogarth's commentators asserts, that "this is introduced only to break the disagreeable uniformity of a wall."[139] It certainly has that effect; but Hogarth so rarely presents any object without a particular and pointed allusion, that I am inclined to think he had some other meaning. May it not be designed to intimate that the good people who compose the congregation, after being blown out of their own country by a religious storm, found a peaceful harbour under this roof, safely sheltered from the hurricanes of enthusiasm and the blasts of superstition?

By the dial of St. Giles' Church, in the distance, we see that it is only half-past eleven. At this early hour, in those good times, there was as much good eating as there is now at six o'clock in the evening. From twenty pewter measures, which are hung up before the houses of different distillers, it seems that good drinking was considered as equally worthy of their serious attention.

The dead cat and choked kennels mark the little attention shown to the streets by the scavengers of St. Giles'. At that time noxious effluvia was not peculiar to this parish. The neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch, and many other parts of the city, were equally polluted.

Even at this refined period, there would be some use in a more strict attention to the medical police of a city so crowded with inhabitants. We ridicule the people of Paris and Edinburgh for neglecting so essential and salutary a branch of delicacy, while the kennels of a street in the vicinity of St. Paul's Church are floated with the blood of slaughtered animals every market day. Moses would have managed these things better: but in those days there was no _physician in Israel_!

EVENING.

"One sultry Sunday, when no cooling breeze Was borne on Zephyr's wing to fan the trees; One sultry Sunday, when the torrid ray O'er nature beam'd intolerable day; When raging Sirius warn'd us not to roam, And Galen's sons prescrib'd--cool draughts at home; One sultry Sunday, near those fields of fame Where weavers dwell, and Spital is their name, A sober wight, of reputation high For tints that emulate the Tyrian dye, Wishing to take his afternoon's repose In easy-chair, had just began to doze, When, in a voice that sleep's soft slumbers broke, His oily helpmate thus her wishes spoke: "'Why, spouse, for shame!--my stars! what's this about? You's ever sleeping!--come, we'll all go out;-- At that there garden,--pr'ythee, do not stare!-- We'll take a mouthful of the country air; In the yew bower an hour or two we'll kill; There you may smoke, and drink what punch you will. Sophy and Billy each shall walk with me, And you must carry little Emily. Veny is sick, and pants, and loathes her food; The grass will do the pretty creature good. Hot rolls are ready as the clock strikes five-- And now 'tis after four, as I'm alive!'