Note 2 — HOGARTH.

"I must leave you to the annals of Fame," says Mr. Walker, the ingenious Lecturer on Natural Philosophy, who favoured me with these particulars, "for the rest of the anecdotes of this great Genius; and shall endeavour to shew you, that his family possessed similar talents, but they were destined, like the wild rose,

"'To waste their sweetness in the desart air.'

"Happy should I be to rescue from oblivion the name of Ald Hogart, whose songs and quibbles have so often delighted my childhood! These simple strains of this mountain Theocritus were fabricated while he held the plough, or was leading his fewel from the hills. He was as critical an observer of nature as his nephew, for the narrow field he had to view her in: not an incident or an absurdity in the neighbourhood escaped him. If any one was hardy enough to break through any decorum of old and established repute; if any one attempted to over-reach his neighbour, or cast a leering eye at his wife; he was sure to hear himself sung over the whole parish, nay, to the very boundaries of the Westmoreland dialect: so that his songs were said to have a greater effect on the manners of his neighbourhood, than even the sermons of the parson himself.

"But his poetical talents were not confined to the incidents of his village. I myself have had the honour to bear a part in one of his plays (I say one, for there are several of them extant in MS. in the mountains of Westmoreland at this hour). This play was called 'The Destruction of Troy.' It was written in metre, much in the manner of Lopez de Vega, or the ancient French drama; the unities were not too strictly observed, for the siege of ten years was all represented; every hero was in the piece; so that the Dramatis Personæ consisted of every lad of genius in the whole parish. The wooden horse—Hector dragged by the heels—the fury of Diomed—the flight of Æneas—and the burning of the city, were all represented. I remember not what Fairies had to do in all this; but as I happened to be about three feet high at the time of this still-talked-of exhibition, I personated one of these tiny beings. The stage was a fabrication of boards placed about six feet high, on strong posts; the green-room was partitioned off with the same materials; it's cieling was the azure canopy of heaven; and the boxes, pit, and galleries, were laid into one by the Great Author of Nature, for they were the green slope of a fine hill. Despise not, reader, this humble state of the provincial drama; let me tell you, there were more spectators, for three days together, than your three theatres in London would hold; and let me add, still more to your confusion, that you never saw an audience half so well pleased.

"The exhibition was begun with a grand procession, from the village to a great stone (dropt by the Devil about a quarter of a mile off, when he tried in vain to erect a bridge across Windermere; so the people, unlike the rest of the world, have remained a very good sort of people ever since). I say the procession was begun by the minstrels of five parishes, and were followed by a yeoman on bull-back—you stare!—stop then till I inform you that this adept had so far civilised his bull, that he would suffer the yeoman to mount his back, and even to play upon his fiddle there. The managers besought him to join the procession; but the bull, not being accustomed to much company, and particularly so much applause; whether he was intoxicated with praise; thought himself affronted, and made game of; or whether a favourite cow came across his imagination; certain it was, that he broke out of the procession; erected his tail, and, like another Europa, carried off the affrighted yeoman and his fiddle, over hedge and ditch, till he arrived at his own field. This accident rather inflamed than depressed the good humour arising from the procession; and the clown, or jack-pudding of the piece, availed himself so well of the incident, that the lungs and ribs of the spectators were in manifest danger. This character was the most important personage in the whole play: for his office was to turn the most serious parts of the drama into burlesque and ridicule: he was a compound of Harlequin and the Merry Andrew, or rather the Arch-fool of our ancient kings. His dress was a white jacket, covered with bulls, bears, birds, fish, &c. cut in various coloured cloth. His trowsers were decorated in like manner, and hung round with small bells; and his cap was that of Folly, decorated with bells, and an otter's brush impending. The lath sword must be of great antiquity in this island, for it has been the appendage of a jack-pudding in the mountains of Westmoreland time out of mind.

"The play was opened by this character with a song, which answered the double purpose of a play-bill and a a prologue, for his ditty gave the audience a foretaste of the rueful incidents they were about to behold; and it called out the actors, one by one, to make the spectators acquainted with their names and characters, walking round and round till the whole Dramatis Personæ made one great circle on the stage. The audience being thus become acquainted with the actors, the play opened with Paris running away with Helen, and Menelaus scampering after them; then followed the death of Patroclus, the rage of Achilles, the persuasions of Ulysses,&c. &c. and the whole interlarded with apt songs, both serious and comic, all the production of Ald Hogart. The bard, however, at this time had been dead some years, and I believe this Fete was a Jubilee to his memory; but let it not detract from the invention of Mr. Garrick, to say that his at Stratford was but a copy of one forty years ago on the banks of Windermere. Was it any improvement, think you, to introduce several bulls into the procession instead of one? But I love not comparisons, and so conclude. Yours, &c. Adam Walker."

However Ald Hogart might have succeeded in the dramatic line, and before a rustic audience, his poems of a different form are every way contemptible. Want of grammar, metre, sense, and decency, are their invariable characteristics. This opinion is founded on a thorough examination of a whole bundle of them, transmitted by a friend since the first publication of this work.