Note 439 — The Alcove.

The Marquis of Bute has, I believe, the most extraordinary and complete collection of Hogarth's Prints that is known. Of the Election Dinner there are six or seven varieties; gloves, and no gloves; hats, from one to the usual number; lemon, and no lemon; punch bowl, and no punch bowl. But of these varying prints, the most curious is the one known by the name of Evening: with a little boy and girl, crying, in the back-ground. At first, Hogarth did not paint the girl, and struck off very few impressions of the plate in this state of the picture. A friend observing to him that the boy was crying with no apparent cause of provocation, Hogarth put in the little girl tantalizing him. But—happy he! who has the print of the 'Evening' without the little girl: fifteen golden guineas (rare things now to meet with!) ought not to induce him to part with it. Of the copper-plate portraits by Hogarth, the original of 'Sarah Malcolm, executed 1732,' is among the very rarest; a copy of this selling for 7l. 17s. 6d. at Barnard's sale. The reader has only to procure that most interesting of all illustrative works, Hogarth Illustrated by John Ireland, 1793, (2d edit.) 3 vols., 8vo.; and, for a comparatively trifling sum, he may be initiated into all the mysteries of Hogarthian virtû. The late Right Hon. W. Wyndham's collection of Hogarth's prints, bequeathed to him by Mr. George Steevens, was bought in for little more than 300 guineas.