grand etching of sly, cruel, worthless Simon
Fraser, Lord Lovat, counting the forces of the
Pretender on his fingers; or correcting the
proof sheets of the Analysis of Beauty; or
scarifying Jack Wilkes on copper; or haply,
keeping quiet, good-humoured company with
his gentle lady wife, Jane Thornhill, telling
her how he engraved pint pots and masquerade
tickets in his youth, and how he painted
his grandest pictures for the love of her.
We have painters, and engravers, and
moralists now-a-days, and to spare, I trow; but
thy name will long smell sweet as violets,
Will Hogarth, though thou wert not a Royal
Academician, nor a "Sir."

Yet, circling round about, stand momentarily
at the corner of a little street—Green
Street by name—full of musty little bookstalls
and fugacious shops. Fugacious I call
them, for their destinies are as fleeting as their
proprietors. They are everything by turns,
and nothing long: now betting-offices, now
print-shops, now cigar-shops, anon oyster-
shops, coffee-shops, brokers' shops. In Green
Street shall you be sensible also of an odour
very marked, of the cookery of the various
foreign boarding-houses and cook-shops of
the neighbourhood; and, towering above
the dingy little houses, shall you see the
Elizabethan chimney-shaft of the St. Martin's
baths and wash-houses: a beacon of cleanliness
to the neighbourhood; a Pharos of soapsuds;
a finger-post to thrift and comfort.

We pass St. Martin's Street—street of no
thoroughfare, but remarkable for Mr. Bertolini's
restaurant, and formerly famous as the
residence of Sir Isaac Newton. We pass the
Soup-kitchen Association's Offices, Star
Street, a score of private houses, and, halting
at number forty-seven, we descry a mansion
of considerable dimensions, formerly the
property of Lord Inchiquin, afterwards the
Western Literary and Scientific Institution,
now the resting-place, I think, of a panorama
of the Australian Gold Diggings; but, before
all these, residence of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Knight, the first President of the Royal
Academy.

It is something to think, gazing at this
plain house from the shabby cab-stand
opposite (where there are always six cabs, and
apparently never any one to hire them) that
to number forty-seven came, sixty years ago,
all that was great, noble, and beautiful
all that was witty, learned, and brave in
this land. It is something to think that
the plain awkward country lad, poor in purse
and pauper in influence in the beginning,
should in this number forty-seven, from 1761
to 1792, have held his state undisputed,
undisturbed as the pontifex maximus of portrait-
painting—the Merlin of his art—that the
steps of his house should have been swept by
the ermine of judges, the lawn of prelates,
the robes of peers, the satin and brocade of
princesses; that there should have been about
his ante-rooms, thrown into corners like
unconsidered trifles, of as little account as the
gewgaws of a player's tiring-room, the fans
of duchesses, the batons of victorious generals,
the badges of chivalry, the laurels of poets,
the portfolios of ministers. It is something
to think that if some spoony lords, some carpet
warriors, some tenth transmitters of a foolish
face, have mingled with the brilliant crowd
at forty-seven, Leicester Fields, its rooms
have re-echoed to the silvery laughter of
Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, to the
commanding tones of Chatham, and
Mansfield, and Camden. It is more to think that
to this house came, to hold familiar converse
with its master, the wise men of England.

Come back, shades of the mighty dead, to
number forty-seven! Come back from
Beaconsfield, Edmund Burke! Come back, Percy,
scholar and poet; Joe Warburton; lively,
vain, kind-hearted David Garrick, courtly
Topham Beauclerc, staunch old General
Oglethorpe, drawing diagrams of the fields of
Belgrade and Peterwardein with filberts, and
nutcrackers, and port wine! Come back,
stout-hearted Pasquale di Paoli; gossipping,
toadying, boozy Boswell. Come back, oh, thou
leviathan of literature, with the large wig
and larger heart, with the rolling gait and
voice of thunder, come back, Samuel Johnson!

Do thou also return, sprightly, kindly
spectre in suit of Filby-made Tyrian bloom
—poet and novelist and essayist and dramatist,
for whom, wert thou alive and hard
up for paper, I would send my last shirt to
the paper mill to make Bath post. Return,
if for a moment, Oliver Goldsmith! Sins
and follies there may be posted against thee in
the Book, but surely tears enough have been
shed over the "Vicar of Wakefield" to blot
them out, and airs of light-hearted laughter
have been wafted from "She stoops to
Conquer" to dry the leaves again a thousand times!

But they cannot come back, these shades,
at my poor bidding. Beaconsfield and Poet's
Corner, St. Paul's and Dromore, will hold
their own until the time shall come. I
cannot even wander through the genius
hallowed rooms of Reynolds's house.
Literary and scientific apparatus, and panorama,
have effaced all vestige thereof. I can but
muse in the spirit on the dining room where
these great ones met—on the octagon
painting room with the arm-chair on a
dais, with the high window looking to the
northward darkened on the day of
Goldsmith's death, with the palette and pencils
laid by for the day when Johnson was buried,
and on every Sunday afterwards, according
to his dying wish.

My square is nearly circled. When I
have stated that David Loggan, the engraver
immortalised by Pope, lived next door to
Hogarth, and that next door on the other
side resided (after the painter's death) John
Hunter, the surgeon, who here formed the
famous anatomical museum, called the
Hunterian collection, and gave every Sunday