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42. Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, a Medley

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ANECDOTES

OF

WILLIAM HOGARTH,

WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

CHAPTER I.

Hogarth's own account of his birth and early education; reasons for his being apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver; with which employment becoming disgusted, he commences an engraver on copper; his method of study; the fate of the first print he published.

I WAS born in the City of London, on the 10th day of November 1697, and baptized the 28th of the same month. My father's pen, like that of many other authors, did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for myself. As I had naturally a good eye, and a fondness for drawing, shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and mimickry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a neighbouring painter, drew my attention from play; and I was, at every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learnt to draw the alphabet with great correctness. My exercises when at school were more remarkable for the or

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naments which adorned them, than for the exercise itself. In the former I soon found that blockheads with better memories could much surpass me; but for the latter, I was particularly distinguished.

Besides the natural turn I had for drawing rather than learning languages, I had before my eyes the precarious /situation of men of classical education. I saw the difficulties under which my father laboured, and the many inconveniences he endured, from his dependance being chiefly on his pen, and the cruel treatment he met with from booksellers and printers, particularly in the affair of a Latin Dictionary, the compiling of which had been a work of some years. It was deposited, in confidence, in the hands of a certain printer, and, during the time it was left, letters of approbation were received from the greatest scholars in England, Scotland, and Ireland. But these flattering testimonies from his acquaintance (who, as appears from their letters, which I have still by me, were of the first class,) produced no profit to the author. It was therefore very conformable to my own wishes that I was taken from school, and served a long apprenticeship to a silver-plate engraver.

I soon found this business in every respect too limited. The paintings of St. Paul's Cathedral and Greenwich hospital, which were at that time going on, ran in my head; and I determined that silver-plate engraving should be fol

* [The Dictionary here alluded to, Mrs. Lewis, of Chiswick, presented to me. It is a thick quarto, containing an early edition of Littleton's Dictionary, and also Robertson's Phrases; with numerous corrections to each, and about 400 pages of manuscript close written. On the marginal leaf is inscribed, in Hogarth's hand-writing : "The manuscript part of this Dictionary was the work of Mr. Richard Hogarth." J. IRELAND.]

lowed no longer than necessity obliged me to it. Engraving on copper was, at twenty years of age, my utmost ambition. To attain this it was necessary that I should learn to draw objects something like nature, instead of the monsters of heraldry, and the common methods of study were much too tedious for one who loved his pleasure, and came so late to it; for the time necessary to learn in the usual mode, would leave me none to spare for the ordinary enjoyments of life. This led me to considering whether a shorter road than that usually travelled was not to be found. The early part of my life had been employed in a business rather detrimental than advantageous to those branches of the art which I wished to pursue, and have since professed. I had learned, by practice, to copy with tolerable exactness in the usual way; but it occurred to me that there were many disadvantages attending this method of study, as having faulty originals, &c. and even when the pictures or prints to be imitated were by the best masters, it was little more than pouring water out of one vessel into another. Drawing in an academy, though it should be after the life, will not make the student an artist; for as the eye is often taken from the original, to draw a bit at a time, it is possible he may know no more of what he has been copying, when his work is finished, than he did before it was begun.

There may be, and I believe are, some who, like the engrossers of deeds, copy every line without remembering a word; and if the deed should be in law Latin, or old French, probably without understanding a word of their original. Happy is it for them; for to retain would be indeed dreadful.

A dull transcriber, who in copying Milton's "Paradise Lost" hath not omitted a line, has almost as much right to be

compared to Milton, as an exact copier of a fine picture by Rubens hath to be compared to Rubens. In both cases the hand is employed about minute parts, but the mind scarcely ever embraces the whole. Besides this, there is an essential difference between the man who transcribes the deed, and he who copies the figure; for though what is written may be line for line the same with the original, it is not probable that this will often be the case with the copied figure; frequently far from it. Yet the performer will be much more likely to retain a recollection of his own imperfect work than of the original from which he took it.

More reasons, not necessary to enumerate, struck me as strong objections to this practice, and led me to wish that I could find the shorter path,—fix forms and characters in my mind, and, instead of copying the lines, try to read the language, and if possible find the grammar of the art, by bringing into one focus the various observations I had made, and then trying by my power on the canvas, how far my plan enabled me to combine and apply them to practice.

For this purpose, I considered what various ways, and to what different purposes, the memory might be applied; and fell upon one which I found most suitable to my situation and idle disposition.

Laying it down first as an axiom, that he who could by any means acquire and retain in his memory, perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the figure, as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, and their infinite combinations (each of these being composed of lines), and would consequently be an accurate designer.

This I thought my only chance for eminence, as I found that the beauty and delicacy of the stroke in engraving was

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