system was unknown then. Mr. Hogarth will tell you that we did in the beginning of this century pretty much as his good friends of the Fleet did sixty years before. That's the gentleman, making a sketch of your Highness on his thumb-nail.

Somerset.-Good evening, Mr. Hogarth. I suppose Mr. Aris reformed the Idle Apprentice, and encouraged the Industrious, after your fashion of showing the Lord Mayor's Coach in one picture, and Tyburn in the other.

Hogarth. No doubt, Protector. It was the old safe rule. Naughty boy, gallows; good boy, riches. But in those times we had not quite so many naughty boys as now. We had our Ginlanes, where the young and the old soon drank themselves dead; and our Blood-bowl-houses, where murder was the rule. But we had no swarms of little wretches, creeping forth from dirty hovels, and becoming thieves out of the cruel neglect of society. Our prisons were not many; and they were not filled with childish pilferers. Thieving then was a profession; and the infants in the schools of thieving were creditably maintained by the masters of the craft till they were proficient.

Aris.-Why, Mr. Hogarth, you talk like the great moralist who was here just now. A good time, that!

Somerset.-Go on, painter.

Hogarth.-I was a great moralist. I painted vice as I saw it. I lived in a state of things in which there was a vast deal of open profligacy, high

and low. The laws were cruel, and the people were brutal. Now, all people profess decency-except the poor victims who hide in stinking alleys-neglected and despised. It is not mere poverty that is their bane. They are outside the pale of humanity. They are not received into Brotherhood. How can the children of these haunts do other than find their way into prisons—and find their way out again, to be again rejected by Society? Prior-Had my House been standing, I would have taken the poor creatures in, and fed them.

Hogarth.-There are many houses in the land where the destitute child is clothed and fed, and is better educated than some of his rich neighbours. The country has prisons enough, and work-houses enough. It wants decent dwellings for those who work, and reformatory schools for those who beg and thieve.

Somerset. Decent dwellings! Why, I wander about London, and sometimes in other places, and see more comfortable houses for the citizens, and better furnished, than nobles possessed in my day.

Hogarth. Oh, yes; such houses pay for building. But the poor man must pay at a double rate, and die of bad air in cellars, and put his children, four in a bed, in vile garrets.

Somerset. You ought to be working at this day, Mr. Hogarth, to tell the rulers these truths in pictures more eloquent than words.

Hogarth. There is plenty of eloquence, and no want of picture satire, and other satire, about such

things. I have successors.

But the rulers seldom

do anything now, as you did in the despotic days. When an evil grows enormous it may be swept away. But they never move to prevent the evil. If anything is done, the people do it themselves. There is plenty of good feeling at work— no want of knowledge.

me

Prior. What are the preachers about? Hogarth.-Your reverence must excuse saying that even in the days of a powerful Church there was more thought of forms than of religion. I painted the 'Sleeping Congregation;' and I painted Fanaticism.' Indifference and Credulity were antagonists in my day. Indifference had the worst of the fight, and things seemed mending. But Credulity put on another garb; and we may have-but I forget how near we are to Smithfield. Somerset. You seem a good Protestant, Mr. Hogarth.

Hogarth.-I am an Englishman. I am more tolerant of foreigners and friars than when I painted 'Calais Gate;' but when I see old superstitions as rampant as when you took a hand in putting them down, I am apt to say, “Oh, for an hour of"-I was going to compliment you-but I would rather say, Oh, for an hour of that Protector who, when intolerance put on her face of persecution, said "The sound of my cannon shall be heard in Rome."

Somerset.-A vigorous Protector was that brewer of Huntingdon. We have had some talk lately.

Falkland and Hampden, he says, are in the New Parliament House; but he, the greatest, has no place. This is a queer generation, Mr. Hogarthrather timid and servile, I opine.

Hogarth.-Kings—

Aris.-Come, Sir, no sedition.

Hogarth. Sedition! Is not the name of 'King' to be mentioned without coupling it with sedition? But you are right. You speak from the remembrance of your own dungeons. Things are changed in England, Mr. Aris.

Somerset.-Truce. I thought my Edward would have changed fear into love. But three centuries were to roll over before that secret of government was understood.. Victoria

Dreamer.-Three cheers!

There was a rattle as of multitudinous applause. Cave's tankard had fallen on the floor;-and I fairly awoke.

THE TAIL-PIECE.

THE last design of Hogarth was a tail-piece to his works. He made an allegory of 'The End.' Time is prostrate on the earth. His scythe is snapped in two; his hour-glass smashed; his will, bequeathing all things to Chaos, is in his palsied hand; the last whiff from his broken pipe curls up into 'Finis.' Around him lie the shoemaker's last ; the cobbler's end; a torn purse; a battered crown; a fractured musket; a cracked bell; a worn-out besom; the capital of a column; a broken palette. The landscape is composed of a ruined tower; a tumble-down hovel; a withered tree; and the sign of The World's End.' In the distance are a gallows and a foundering ship. Phœbus is falling from his chariot; the moon is darkened.

In this emblematic print, while we admire the ingenuity of the artist, we see the limited range of his art. Material objects are poor exponents of abstract ideas. But they may tell something.

It was a fashion of the minor poets of the seventeenth century to write verses which they called 'Advice to a Painter,' or, ' Directions to a Painter.' If I were to give suggestions to a designer for a tail-piece to 'Once upon a Time,' I should saysketch a pendant to Hogarth's Finis.'

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