HOGARTH.

WILLIAM HOGARTH, a celebrated painter, was born in London, in the year 1698, and bound appren tice to an engraver of arms on silver plate. About 1720 he set up business for himself, and his first employment was to engrave coats of arms and shop bills. He next executed plates for booksellers, the chief of which are the prints to Hudibras. His first performance, as a painter, was a representation of the Wanstead assembly, the portraits being taken from life. In 1730 he married a daughter of Sir James Thornhill. A few years afterwards, appeared his Harlot's Progress, the success of which stamped his reputation, and was followed by other moral histories, no less admirably

executed.

In these compositions Hogarth was not always solicitous about the beauty or the correctness of his figures; his chief aim seems to be to give to his personages, in a manner peculiarly striking, the expression of the passion by which they are supposed to be actuated. Innumerable details and allegories, conspicuous in his productions, tend to encrease the effect of the scene, and to bring forward, with greater energy, the principal characters. The Progress of Vice is always well pourtrayed, immorality constantly punished, and virtue rewarded, which, in fact, is one of the excellencies of his works. Hogarth went over to France, after the treaty of Aix la Chapelle; and while at Calais began to sketch a drawing of the gate of the town, for

which he was taken up, but was soon after released. This circumstance he ridiculed in an excellent caricature.

Hogarth has been thought to have deviated from his proper sphere, when, in 1753, he published his Analysis of Beauty. In this work he has endeavoured to fix the standard of taste in this particular point, and successfully proved, by an infinity of examples, that the crooked line is that of beauty; and that circular forms are the most agreeable to the eye. This work has been translated into French.

Hogarth was very vain, and thought himself the first painter of the age. He was also remarkably absent, of which the following is an instance. "On setting up his carriage he paid a visit to the Lord Mayor; and having protracted his stay till a heavy shower came on, he was let out at a different door from that by which he entered, and, unmindful of his carriage, he set off on foot, and got home dripping wet. When Mrs. Hogarth asked him where he had left the carriage, he said he had forgot it." He was accustomed, it is said, to draw upon the nail of his thumb the figures which struck him, and the remembrance of which he was desirous to preserve. He died in 1762, and was interred in the church-yard of Chiswick.

HORTENSIUS.

HORTENSIUS, whose eloquence placed him on the rank of the first orators of antiquity, was born at Rome, in the year 640 of its foundation, 113 years before J. C. and eight years before Cicero. He was called to the bar at 19, and at that age greatly distinguished himself in two brilliant causes. He defended the province of Africa against certain governors, by whom it was oppressed, and pleaded for Nicomedes, king of Bithynia. It is from this period that Cicero reckoned the forty four years which Hortensius passed in the exercise of his profession.

After having defended, with infinite success, the royal prerogative and the liberty of the people, Hortensius was intrusted with affairs of still greater importance; but the war of the allies, by checking the flow of his eloquence, effaced for a time his glory, and opened to him a new career. The advocate of Nicomedes appeared as a soldier in the Roman legions, and merited by his valour to be raised, the following year, to the rank of military tribune. Peace, however, restored him to his former occupations.

It is well known that the dictates of friendship induced him to defend the despicable Verres, whom the people of Sicily denounced. At this moment he had an adversary worthy of him. The eloquence of Cicero, and the notoriety of the crimes imputed to Verres, compelled Hortensius to abandon his client, who condemned himself to exile.