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Lord Charlemont wrote to Edmund Malons from Dublin, June 29th, 1781: 'That men of task should wish for good impressions of Hogarth's prints is not at all surprising, as I look upon him to have been in his way, and that too an original way, one of the first of geniuses. Neither am I much surprised at the rage you mention, as I am by experience well acquainted with the collector's madness.
This originality and boldness in disregarding the tame but universal convention in posing the sitter was peculiarly Hogarth's own. With him it amounted almost to perverseness. He would not let anybody "sit" to him, if he could help it.
But kings and beggars are not affording the glaring discrepancies of Hogarth's "Olympus in a Barn," but suggesting and preserving the distinctions far below the buskins, the breastplate, the sandals, the symars.
"Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself. Then I would remember My Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own. But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at my window.
A week later a governor and a chaplain together entered Hogarth's cell with news of his reprieve. Eight months later he was being trundled in "Black Maria" to Paddington Station amid a Babel of escaped tongues, when, sitting in his pigeonhole, he heard the unknown voice before him cry: "Well, Jim, we're away to the mountain's brow!" Jim, nothing but a voice, was heard: "Worse luck!
But twenty years after William Hogarth's death the copyrights had expired the poor woman's income from this source was clean gone. She was then absolutely 'living by her lodgings; and it was not until three years more 'that the King interposed with the Royal Academy, and obtained for her an annuity of forty pounds. Poor Widow Hogarth!
There, at the south edge, stood a marine trumpeting something at Hogarth's yacht; and, just landing at the Boodah from his gig, a fretful Yankee skipper, register in hand with a bag of L900 sea-rent in gold, while twenty yards yonder rode his smoking ship loaded with grain for Rouen; and on the eastern horizon the armada, in crescent at present, moving with fires banked at two knots, a glare hiding them from the naked eye, but the glass revealing them like toys in the abstract, ethereally hazy.
Having been bred a Dissenter, and not being over-familiar with the Established Church service, Mr. Hogarth's famous picture of "Morning," and as if my Lady Lydia had been accustomed to have a chaplain all her life. She seemed to patronise not only the new chaplain, but the service and the church itself, as if she had never in her own country heard a Ranter in a barn.
It was commonly said, and generally credited, that he died of a broken heart in consequence of the furious attacks which had followed upon his unhappy quarrel with Wilkes. It was a pity that the closing hours of Hogarth's life should have been occupied with so petty and so regrettable a squabble. Hogarth was entirely in the wrong.
As Hogarth's Conversation Pieces grew into his Progresses, so this project seems to have developed into Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.
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