to have come to him at his own table among his friends, and he
said to them: "My next undertaking shall be the 'End of all things.'"
The next day his graver was already busy with the strange plate which he
called "The Bathos," where Father Time is seen dying, his broken scythe
and hour-glass beside him, amid a chaos of ruin all around.

This was actually his last work, for a month later, on the 28th of
October, 1764, having returned in weak health from Chiswick to his house
in Leicester Fields, he died suddenly of an aneurysm on his chest. His
tomb at Chiswick, where his widow came to join him twenty-five years
later (in 1789), was adorned in relief with the mask of Comedy, the
wreath of laurel, the palette and the book on Beauty; and it was his
friend Garrick who is said to have composed those lines of his epitaph,
with which we too may take our farewell of the great artist of comedy:

"... Whose pictur'd morals charm the mind,
And through the eye correct the heart.
If genius fire thee, reader, stay;
If nature touch thee, drop a tear;
If neither move thee, turn away,
For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here."

III

THE COMEDY OF SOCIETY

In the work of Henry William Bunbury we strike an entirely different
note to that of the artist we have just studied. The contrast is, in its
way, refreshing as well as instructive. Just as Hogarth appears (b.
1698) at almost the first years of the eighteenth century, so Bunbury
dates (b. 1750) from exactly its dividing year; therefore he belongs no
longer to those days of Swift and Bolingbroke and Walpole, of Jacobite
intrigue and Hanoverian power, but to the period of the American war,
and those ominous thunderclouds preceding the French Revolution.

Again, just as William Hogarth belongs entirely to the people, and
shares profoundly both their best and worst qualities, so the artist we
are now considering belongs no less definitely to the aristocratic
class--is a member of a Suffolk family which dated its English origin to
the Conquest, which had gained its knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, and
its baronetcy from the Merry Monarch; and had himself in his younger
days made the "grand tour" of France and Italy, and later held a
commission in his Majesty's Militia, and the post of equerry to the Duke
of York.

"Something of the amateur"--I have written elsewhere[4]--"remains
through all the work of Bunbury, who left politics practically out of
his field of sub