Chapter 14

HOGARTH A VISITOR AT ISLINGTON--HIS CHARACTER--STREET STUDIES--SYMPATHIES BETWEEN AUTHORS AND PAINTERS--SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS--HIS CHARACTER--HIS DINNERS--THE LITERARY CLUB-ITS MEMBERS--JOHNSON'S REVELS WITH LANKEY AND BEAU--GOLDSMITH AT THE CLUB

Among the intimates who used to visit the poet occasionally, in his retreat at Islington, was Hogarth the painter. Goldsmith had spoken well of him in his essays in the "Public Ledger," and this formed the first link in their friendship. He was at this time upward of sixty years of age, and is described as a stout, active, bustling little man, in a sky-blue coat, satirical and dogmatic, yet full of real benevolence and the love of human nature. He was the moralist and philosopher of the pencil; like Goldsmith he had sounded the depths of vice and misery, without being polluted by them; and though his picturings had not the pervading amenity of those of the essayist, and dwelt more on the crimes and vices than the follies and humors of mankind, yet they were all calculated, in like manner, to fill the mind with instruction and precept, and to make the heart better.

Hogarth does not appear to have had much of the rural feeling with which Goldsmith was so amply endowed, and may not have accompanied him in his strolls about hedges and green lanes; but he was a fit companion with whom to explore the mazes of London, in which he was continually on the lookout for character and incident. One of Hogarth's admirers speaks of having come upon him in Castle Street, engaged in one of his street studies, watching two boys who were quarreling; patting one on the back who flinched, and endeavoring to spirit him up to a fresh encounter. "At him again! D--- him, if I would take it of him! at him again!"

A frail memorial of this intimacy between the painter and the poet exists in a portrait in oil, called "Goldsmith's Hostess." It is supposed to have been painted by Hogarth in the course of his visits to Islington, and given by him to the poet as a means of paying his landlady. There are no friendships among men of talents more likely to be sincere than those between painters and poets. Possessed of the same qualities of mind, governed by the same principles of taste and natural laws of grace and beauty, but applying them to different yet mutually illustrative arts, they are constantly in sympathy and never in collision with each other.

A still more congenial intimacy of the kind was that contracted by Goldsmith with Mr. afterward Sir Joshua Reynolds. The latter was now about forty years of age, a few years older than the poet, whom he charmed by the blandness and benignity of his manners, and the nobleness and generosity of his disposition, as much as he did by the graces of his pencil and the magic of his coloring. They were men of kindred genius, excelling in corresponding qualities of their several arts, for style in writing is what color is in