468

GENTEEL AND LOW PROFLIGACY.

[1709-1742. deems street nuisances, are undisturbed, whilst the irritable professor stops his ears and shrieks in vain. Before Covent Garden Church, on a snowy morning, market-women are warming themselves at a fire of sticks, and the quack doctor is holding forth to the crowd. When magistracy, even, puts on its grandest pomp and splendour in the Lord Mayor's Show, the lumbering gilt coach is surrounded by a mob of whooping and fighting blackguards. By night, confusion is worse confounded. Bonfires blaze in the narrowest streets on occasions of public rejoicing. The Salisbury Flying Coach is overturned at Charing Cross, amidst the crackling of tar-barrels and the hissing of squibs. Traitors' heads upon Temple Bar are lighted up by the fire beneath that burns Guy Faux. In their usual state the streets are dark. The cut-purse and the burglar roam about unmolested. The rake beats the watchman, and carries his staff and his lanthorn in triumph to the hideous revels at the night-house. The " fiery fop," the "frolic drunkard,"

"Lords of the street, and terrors of the way,"

insult every passenger; and no judicious magistrate fines the rich ruffian five pounds, as in our more decorous days.

The anarchy of the streets is but a type of the absence of all legal supervision and control in houses of public resort, and in places of amusement for high and low. One of Hogarth's early prints is " A Midnight Conversation." Twenty years after Steele and Addison had exhibited, under many forms, the club-life of London, Hogarth brings together a far less decorous set in tipsy jollity. They are not the drunkards of the pot-house. They are the noble Britons who, up to the end of the eighteenth century, thought it no disgrace to a gentleman to be led reeling home by the watchman, or to fall under the table, whilst roaring out the Bacchanalian songs which were the most precious gifts of the English Muse. The president, who is concocting a fresh bowl of punch, is a rubicund divine; whose calling, according to the theory of that age, is as much denoted by the corkscrew hanging from his finger, as by the band and cassock which he wears. The solemn listener next to him, with his band and his full-bottomed wig, is a barrister. Another distinguished personage of the company, judging by his laced cravat and his sword, is an undoubted gentleman, although he is so far gone in enjoyment that he sets fire to his ruffles instead of his pipe. The officer with the cockade breaks his head as he falls from his chair; and the apothecary, holding on to the table, pours brandy upon the bald pate. The justice has hung up his cocked hat and wig, and has made himself comfortable in his nightcap, sitting apart in resolute drinking. Maudlin drunkenness, ranting drunkenness, sleepy drunkenness, sprawling drunkenness, are given with inimitable minuteness of character and incident. This is genteel revelry. In the night-cellar in Chick-lane, Smithfield, some of the low profligates are fighting in the background with chairs and pokers, whilst others are quietly smoking on. The thieves in the foreground are dividing their booty; their murdered man is thrust into a hole; the constable comes, not to disperse the whole gang of the Blood-bowl house, but to carry off Tom Idle to Newgate. He began his career by gambling in the churchyard; the beadle + Rake's Progress, 3.

* Morning.

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THE COCKPIT-THE GAMING-HOUSE.

469

stands over him with a stick. He is sent to sea; and runs away from the round dozen. He comes home and becomes a thief; and the end is the last ride in a cart to Tyburn. Tyburnia is now otherwise occupied than in looking upon a procession of javelin men followed by a ragged and scrambling mob, whilst Tiddy-Doll sells his cakes, and but for the coffin in the cart, the gathering has as merry an aspect as a country fair. This is the last step in the mad dance of low profligacy; and the great master of the cere monies is the hangman, who sits astride upon the gallows, smoking his pipe. What the Bear-garden was in the time of Steele is the Cockpit in the time of Hogarth. It is free for all men. The gambler by profession here sits by the side of the amateur in the blue ribbon, as welcome as in the ring at Epsom. The blind peer

is betting with the blackguards around him; whilst the thief at his elbow is purloining the banknote which my lord is prepared to stake. Another illustrious one, with a star on his breast, is jammed amongst the crowd; the carpenter, in his shirt sleeves, presses on the noble shoulder, and thus disturbs the earnestness with which his lordship contemplates the two cocks at the crisis of the game. In the fashionable gaming-house, there is the same equality and happy fraternity. The rake, who has run through

470

THE RAKE'S LEVEE.

[1709-1742 of the common-room leads to the mad-house. The terrible scenes of melancholy and laughing madness which Cibber personified in his statues, are

minutely displayed by Hogarth. Bedlam was an image of the external life which the painter has represented in so many aspectsthe ludicrous side by side with the terrible; and the attempts to make the mad world sane were founded upon the same ignorance of moral health and disease as in the treatment of the lunatic by a general system of coercion.

Horace Walpole has remarked of Hogarth "the very furniture of his rooms describe the characters to whom they belong. The rake's levee-room, the nobleman's dining-room, the apartments of the husband and wife

in Marriage à-la-mode, the alderman's parlour, the poet's bed-chamber, and many others, are the history of the manners of the age." This is true, as far as it goes. "It was reserved to Hogarth to write a scene of furniture." In the same way Hogarth is the great authority for costume. But dress and furniture are only a small part of the "history of the manners of the age." Let us look at the domestic life associated with these externals. The rake's levee-room is peopled with a group of figures that again remind us of the chaotic state of society even in gilded saloons. Charles Lamb has described this remarkable exhibition as "almost a transcript" of the opening scene of Shakspere's Timon:' "we find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters in both." But the difference is as manifest as the similarity. In Timon's levee we have the poet, the painter, the jeweller, and the merchant. The Rake, in his morning gown, attends to the bully who grasps his sword, and places his hand on his breast, to intimate the secresy with which he will stab in the dark. The jockey exhibits the bowl which his master's racers have won. The prize-fighter comes to teach him the science of quarter-staff. The French fencer and the attitudinising dancing-master, are ready to give their lessons. Handel is touching the harpsichord. Bridgman has his designs for a landscape garden when the villa is built :

"Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool."

The poet is in the antechamber spouting his verses amongst tailors and wigmakers. It is exaggeration, we may say, to group together such opposite professors of fashionable accomplishments. But ostentation makes no nice distinctions. The patron sees no difference between the poet and the dancing-master.

If the Rake's levee may seem to some an overstrained representation, the genius of Hogarth has been vindicated by Scott seizing upon similar characteristics of the levee of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham-" a

1709-1742.]

MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE.

471

gathering of eagles to the slaughter." Amidst projectors, and gamesters, and others of "the sordid train," who "stimulate the wild wishes of lavish and wasteful extravagance," are the poet, the architect, the musician-" all genuine descendants of the daughter of the horse-leech, whose cry is, Give, give." Turn to the fourth plate of "Marriage à-la-mode." The lady Squander is at her public toilette. As her hair is dressed-the most important labour of the day-Farinelli is singing to a flute accompaniment. A fashionable lady is in ecstacy; a country gentleman is asleep. The coxcomb sips his coffee with the vacant indifference that belongs to an exquisite with his hair in papers. The mistress of the mansion, whose plebeian wealth has been wedded to titled poverty, is receiving from a gentleman who is lolling upon a sofa a ticket for the masquerade. The barrister who drew the settlement for the marriage of the lady is thus making arrangements for a very prompt dissolution of the tie. The citizen's daughter is the victim of the lawyer's profligacy. The lawyer passes his sword through the noble husband, and is hanged. The lady takes poison. There are various

scenes of this drama before we reach the catastrophe. One scene has been painted with matchless skill. The lady has passed the night in her splendid mansion, amidst a crowd of visitors. She has snatched an hour or two of broken and feverish sleep, and has risen unrefreshed to a late breakfast. The servants have been unable to repair the disorder of the previous night. It is noon, but the candles are still burning; the furniture is disarranged; the floor is strewed with music, and books of games, and overturned chairs. The husband has spent his night from home. The jaded debauchee-his dress disordered, his features pale and fallen, his whole attitude expressive of that

"Peveril of the Peak."

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THE ELECTION PRINTS.

[1709-1742. withering satiety which has drunk the dregs of what is called pleasure, and found nothing but poison in the cup-tells a tale of the ruin which has overwhelmed thousands. Neither the besotted husband nor the careless wife can listen to the silent remonstrances of the old steward, who comes to them with a bundle of unpaid bills, and a file with only one receipt upon it. The uplifted hand and careworn face of the old servant distinctly paint the ruin which he sees approaching in debt and dishonour. The catastrophe, indeed, is more sudden than he expects.

If this be the life of fashionable England, we can scarcely be surprised at its "Gin Lane," where the drunken wife lets her infant fall from her arms down an area; and the tumble-down house reveals the spectral sight of a wretch hanging to a beam. The moral is here written in Capital letters, which those who run may read. The moral is not quite so legible, when we look upon that print in which Francis Goodchild, esquire, sheriff of London, is represented as feasting the liverymen of his company. The eager clamour for fresh supplies; the gloating satisfaction of the healthful feeder; the exhausted appetite of the apoplectic gorger-these triumphs of civilisation may yet attest that Hogarth was "not for an age, but for all time" in some of these note-books. The satire of his "election" is of course only local and temporary. There is now no treating allowed. The odious attempt to seduce the incorruptible British patriot by a vulgar feast is proscribed by statute and by custom. No candidate at the head of the table, with "Liberty and Loyalty" for his banner, submits to be whispered to by a fat old hag, whilst a facetious elector knocks their heads together. No haberdasher brings an assortment of ribbons and gloves, and is paid by a promissory note. The wife threatening her husband with vengeance if he refuses the proffered bribe,

is necessarily extinct. The attorney knocked off his chair by a brickbat that comes through the window, can no longer apply to the gentle people that some libellers in our day call "roughs." The banner of "no Jews" has gone, with every other proclamation of intolerance. Ignorance is banished