on
the Green.

[Sidenote: 1745--William Hogarth]

The genius of William Hogarth is inseparably associated with the
Forty-five by reason of this famous portrait of Simon Lovat, and for
yet another reason. In this year (1745) William Hogarth was already
exceedingly popular, although he had as yet failed to bask much in the
sunshine of royal favor. Those old, early days of poverty and struggle
were far behind. The industrious apprentice had married his master's
daughter, fifteen years ago by this time, and Sir James Thornhill had
forgotten his {231} wrath and forgiven the young painter who was so
immeasurably his superior. "The Harlot's Progress," "The Rake's
Progress," "Industry and Idleness," and many another plate in the
astonishing panorama of mid last century life, had earned for Hogarth a
high position in the favor of the day; and when he posted down to St.
Albans, where wicked Simon Lovat lay sick, to receive the old traitor's
lathered embrace and to make the famous engraving, William Hogarth was
a very distinguished person indeed. The portrait of Simon Fraser had a
great success. Never did portrait bear more distinctly the impress of
fidelity. The unwieldy trunk, the swollen legs, the horrible, cunning,
satyr-like face with its queerly lifted eyebrows, its flattened sensual
nose, and its enormous mouth, the odd dogmatic gesture with which the
index finger of the left hand touches the thumb of the right: all these
things William Hogarth immortalized--making Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat)
wellnigh as familiar a personality to us as he was to any of the men be
betrayed or the women he wronged in the course of his base life. The
plate had a prodigious success. The presses were hard at work for many
days, and could not print proofs fast enough. "For several weeks,"
says Mr. Sala, "Hogarth received money at the rate of twelve pounds a
day for prints of his etching." It was reduced in size and printed as
a watch-paper--watch-papers were vastly fashionable in those days--and
in that Liliputian form it sold also in large quantities. The infamy
of the subject and the genius of the artist lent a double attraction to
the portrait.

But the portrait of Simon Fraser is not the only, is not perhaps even
the chief, connection of Hogarth with the Forty-five. Whether Hogarth
did or did not do the sketch for the mezzotint engraving called
"Lovat's Ghost on Pilgrimage" matters little. He certainly did do the
famous pictur