which had been granted the preceding year to William Wood, to furnish a copper coinage of a certain amount for the use of Ireland, suddenly raised him to such a height of popular favour as has rarely been attained by any writer or public man. His famous Letters directed against Wood's scheme, professing to be written by "M. B. Drapier" (or Draper), are among the most vigorous productions of his pen. In the spring of 1726 he revisited England, and spent a few months there, principally with his friend Pope at Twickenham. During this visit he was introduced at the court of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., where he frequently made his appearance and attracted great attention. He returned to England, recalled by the serious illness of Stella, in August; and soon after his departure appeared, anonymously, his renowned 'Travels into several Nations of the World, of Lemuel Gulliver.' Few works that have ever been published have excited the eager and universal avidity with which this was read on its first appearance; it had an interest for all classes and all ages; it was at once the most pungent of political satires, and the most ingenious and entertaining of fictions. Gulliver's Travels' were followed in the next year by three volumes of Miscellanies,' prepared for the press by Pope, and consisting of pieces written by the two friends. A fourth volume was added in 1733. In March, 1727, Swift again visited England, and remained till the beginning of October. This was the last time he left Ireland. After the death of Stella, in January following, he resumed his pen as an Irish patriot, and produced in the course of the next six or eight years many short political pieces. Several of his more elaborate compositions in verse were also published about this time. In 1731 he got into a controversy with the Dissenters principally upon the subject of the Test Act, which was continued for some years; and about the same time we find him contending with the bishops in his own church upon the extent of the episcopal authority. In 1732 an edition of his collected works was brought out in four volumes by Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller. In 1735 he composed, among other pieces in verse, his poignant poetical satire entitled

the Legion Club,' directed against the Irish House of Commons, which had excited his indignation by its opposition to the tithe on pasture lands, or tithe of agistment as it is called. This was his last poetical performance of any length. About the same time he performed his last part as an agitator in civil politics by exerting himself against a scheme of the Primate, Boulter, for a new regulation of the Irish exchanges,-in this instance, however, without success. Not long after this, his memory began rapidly to decay; the fits of sudden rage to which he had always been subject, became much more frequent and more ungovernable; from the summer of 1740 he could no longer be accounted to be in possession of his reason; the dissolution of his understanding was succeeded by a state of furious lunacy, accompanied with severe physical suffering; and this lasted till his death, on the 19th of October, 1745. His remains were interred in the great aisle of St. Patrick's Cathedral, where a conspicuous tablet placed on an adjoining pillar records the spot, in the memorable words composed by himself: "Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, &c., ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.' [Here he rests, where fierce indignation can no longer lacerate his heart.] By a will dated in May, 1740, he left the principal part of his property to found an hospital for lunatics in Dublin. What he was both intellectually and morally, the facts that have been related must be left to show. Many passages in his private history remain obscure and imperfectly intelligible after all the investigation that has been bestowed upon them; and where he may seem to have acted the most strangely and unaccountably much may be unknown by which his conduct might perhaps have been explained and vindicated. He possessed, undoubtedly, some high moral qualities; and where he erred it is probable that he also suffered. As a writer and thinker, he is one of the most masculine, and at the same time one of the most original, in our prose literature ; and in his own style, the language can boast of no greater master of wit and humour.

"I was born," says Hogarth in his Memoirs of himself, "in the City of London, November 10, 1697. My father's pen, like that of many 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 mimicry, 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 ornaments 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."

To this account of Hogarth's childhood we have only to add, that his father, an enthusiastic and laborious

scholar, who, like many of his craft, owed little to the favour of fortune, consulted these indications of talent as well as his means would allow, and bound his son apprentice to a silver plate-engraver. But Hogarth aspired after something higher than drawing ciphers and coats-of-arms; and before the expiration of his indentures he had made himself a good draughtsman, and obtained considerable knowledge of colouring. It was his ambition to become distinguished as an artist; and not content with being the mere copier of other men's productions he sought to combine the functions of the painter with those of the engraver, and to gain the power of delineating his own ideas, and the fruits of his acute observation. He has himself explained the nature of his views in a passage which is worth attention.

Many reasons 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 canvass 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 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-five letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations." Acting on these principles, he improved by constant exercise his natural powers of observation and recollection. In his rambles among the motley scenes of London he was ever on the watch for striking features or incidents; and not trusting entirely to memory, he was accustomed, when any face struck him as peculiarly grotesque or expressive, to sketch it on his thumb-nail, to be treasured up on paper at his return home.

For some time after the expiration of his apprenticeship, Hogarth continued to practise the trade to which

he was bred; and his shop-bills, coats-of-arms, engravings upon tankards, &c., have been collected with an eagerness quite disproportionate to their value. Soon he procured employment in furnishing frontispieces and designs for the booksellers. The most remarkable of these are the plates to an edition of Hudibras, published in 1726: but even these are of no distinguished merit. About 1728 he began to seek employment as a portrait-painter. Most of his performances were small family pictures, containing several figures, which he calls Conversation Pieces,' from twelve to fifteen inches high. These for a time were very popular, and his practice was considerable, as his price was low. His life-size portraits are few; the most remarkable are that of Captain Coram in the Foundling Hospital, and that of Garrick as King Richard III. But his practice as a portrait-painter was not lucrative, nor his popularity lasting. Although many of his likenesses were strong and characteristic, in the representation of beauty, elegance, and high-breeding he was little skilled. The nature of the artist was as uncourtly as his pencil; he despised, or affected to despise, what is called embellishment, forgetting that every great painter of portraits has founded his success upon his power of giving to an object the most favourable representation of which it is susceptible. When Hogarth obtained employment and eminence of another sort, he abandoned portrait-painting, with a growl at the jealousy of his professional brethren, and the vanity and blindness of the public.

March 25, 1729, Hogarth contracted a stolen marriage with the only daughter of the once fashionable painter, Sir James Thornhill. The father, for some time implacable, relented at last; and the reconciliation, it is said, was much forwarded by his admiration of the 'Harlot's Progress,' a series of six prints, commenced in 1731, and published in 1734. The novelty as well as merit of this series of prints won for them extraordinary popularity; and their success encouraged Hogarth to undertake a similar history of the 'Rake's Progress,' in eight prints, which appeared in 1735. The third, and perhaps the most popular, as it is the least objectionable