mosaicked pavement or the striped pitchen, and
careless of the charge of those fiery Ruperts
and Cavalier drivers of London, the Hansom
cabmen, you will see here and there, amid lines
of buff-coloured, mud-splashed, square-topped
houses, a residence that shows some signs of
ancient grandeur— heavy brick cornices and long
fluted pilasters of a dull red— which enables
you to fairly realise that in this lane, which then
had hedges flanking it, and a turnpike leading
to Covent-garden, opposite Salisbury House,
where tradition says the seven bishops lodged
before they went, a nosegay of martyrs, to the
Tower, dwelt all sorts of plumed and starred
great people of the time of Charles I., Charles
II., and the early Georges. Raleigh's son, for
instance; the poet Suckling, who sang so
bewitchingly of the country wedding in the
Haymarket; Kenelm Digby, the eccentric chemist
and Platonist, of whose beautiful wife Ben Jonson
writes; the great demagogue Chancellor,
Shaftesbury, who so nearly upset old Rowley,
his master; Archbishop Tenison; Mayerne,
James the First's quack physician; Ambrose
Phillips, that Pope laughed at for his pastoral,
that Gray parodied; Mytens and Vandernost the
painters, and a host of others. Fuseli, too, the
wild Swiss, who painted ghosts and monsters,
Reynolds before he went to Great Newport-
street, and that dull Dorsetshire gentleman who
painted the dome of St. Paul's, and whose
daughter Hogarth married, Sir James Thornhill,
lived here and died.

The room where a Quaker's meeting-house
now stands, is where the flighty French sculptor
Roubilliac had his studio, it is in Peter's-court,
where, too, the first English academy had its
meetings and classes, that Hogarth denounced
as likely to fill the profession with every boy
that could not afford to go to school.

And here especially—for our room runs short
before we have scarcely more than sketched the
present aspect of " the lane of St. Martin—" was
Old Slaughter's Coffee-house, the resort of all the
engravers and painters of Hogarth's cocked-hat
time. Here, on his thumb-nail, he took down
some of the humours of club life, such as he has
shown us in his " Midnight Conversation,"
where the two sandbank parsons are the only
persons sober at four o'clock in the morning.
The chief visitors at Old Slaughter's, where, years
after, late, at the dusk, Wilkie, pale and worn from
his easel, used to steal in, are worth mentioning,
as showing the society whom Hogarth loved to
snap his sharp sayings at, and to drink and
laugh with. There was Isaac Ware, the old
architect, whom, when a chimney-sweep, a
gentleman had seen sketching the portico of St.
Martin's Church with chalk on a wall, and upon
that picked him up to study in Italy. There he
is with the inerasable stain of soot still on his
old yellow skin. He lives in Bloomsbury-
square, in the house where old D'lsraeli
afterwards lived. Next him is Gravelot, who keeps a
drawing-school in the Strand, and did the designs
for Hanmer's small Shakspeare. Perhaps his
fellow-worker, Grignon, the engraver, is with
him. Then there is Gwynn, the architect, who
competed for Blackfriars-bridge, and built the
bridge at Salisbury; he is a friend of old Dr.
Johnson, who writes his prefaces for him, and
comes to see him in Leicester-fields, where
Hogarth lives, with the gilt cork head over his
door. Then there is fat old Hudson, the fashionable
portrait painter, who is such a poor stick that
he has men to paint his drapery for him. He is
Hogarth's butt, the little satirist calls him " a
fat-headed man," and loves to trick him with
sham Rembrandts, of which he has a rare collection.
The "fat-head" lives in Great Queen-
street. Next him is M'Ardell, the engraver,
who lives at the Gold Ball, in Henrietta-
street; he engraves for Reynolds, who lauds
him to the skies. He engraved for Hogarth brave
old Captain Coram, who reared the Foundling,
and died poor, but happy. Then there is that
mad, drunken, clever Luke Sullivan, who etched
the March to Finchley, who little thinks now
that he will die in a garret half starved. But
why is not Gardelle, the portrait painter of
Leicester-fields, here? Because he is in the
condemned cell at Newgate for murdering his
landlady, and Hogarth goes to-morrow to sketch him
in the fatal white cap. That quiet old fellow in
the corner is old Moser, who manages the new
academy in the lane, in Roubilliac' s rooms; and
those men just come in are fresh from the " Dons
at the Barn" Club, opposite St. Martin's Church,
just by the watch-house. They are Smith, a
pupil of Roubilliac' s; blind Parry, the Welsh
harper, a great draughts player; Red-nosed
Wilson, a clever young landscape painter; and
Hayman, the painter whom Hogarth went to
Calais with.

Look now at the mountain heap of wicker
flasks on the floor; see the squat Schiedam
bottles with the badges on them thrown by in a
corner; observe the cloaks, and swords, and
wigs, and cocked-hats, hung on the well-known
pegs. One fellow, though fallen on the floor,
still sings " Sally in our Alley." One is
asleep; another sets his ruffle on fire trying to
light his pipe. Two are moping back to back;
and yet lo! the door opens, and in comes another
smoking china caldron of punch.

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