HOGARTH.

artist already feels that he is scaling the lowest steps of that lofty flight which terminates in some altitude, at present invisible to his earnest and upward-gazing eyes, but where his "undoubting mind" believes that Fame is already awaiting his arrival. There may be as wide a disparity between the crude sketches of his childhood and the matured productions which subsequently gave their author his title to rank among the masters of his art, as between the silver thread of water welling up on a green hill-side, and the abounding river into which it afterwards expands; but there exists between them a connection no less indissoluble, and we naturally feel the same interest in referring to the early intimations of genius manifested by artists, as in tracing the noble river to its obscure source. In the peculiar realm which they are destined to inhabit and adorn, painters are emphatically "native and to the manner born."

"As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing," says HOGARTH, writing of his own childhood, "shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure; and mimickry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a neighbouring painter drew my attention from play; and I was, at every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learned to draw the alphabet with great correctness. My exercises, when at school, were more remarkable for the ornaments which

adorned them than for the exercise itself." And Hogarth's childish predilections are but the type and counterpart of those of hundreds of other artists in all countries for the last five centuries. VELASQUEZ, liberally educated by the self-denying affection of his parents, covered the backs of the sheets of paper on which his school-boy tasks were written, with sketches and drawings not altogether destitute of the genius which distinguished the productions of his maturer years; and, in the studio of Francisco de Herrera, exercised his pencil in pourtraying the peasantry in the streets, or the frequenters of the posadas of Seville. CORNELIUS HUYSMAN, while yet a child, fascinated by the sight of some pictures executed by James Van Artois, then in the meridian of his fame, journeyed from Antwerp to Brussels, detailed to the astonished artist the cause and object of his visit, and, having been received into the household of the latter, commenced the ascent of the path which leads to fame. Our own GAINSBOROUGH, before he had arrived at the age of ten years, had filled his copy-books with sketches of the woodland scenery of Suffolk, spending his holiday hours in "catching soft hints from Nature's tongue," and storing his mind with images of sylvan beauty. "No fine clump of trees," says his biographer, "no picturesque stream, nor romantic glade, no cattle grazing, nor flocks reposing, nor peasants pursuing their rural or pastoral occu

BIRD, MORLAND, OPIE, CIMABUE, ETC.

5

pations, escaped his diligent pencil." (A). Who does. not remember the circumstance of BIRD chalking outlines on the furniture of his mother's house, and exclaiming, with all the glee of a child of four years old, "Well done, little Neddy Bird!"—of MORLAND'S drawings, so full of promise, at the same age? and of OPIE exciting the anger of his father, the rugged mechanic, by making fantastic designs with red chalk upon the deals which had been carefully planed for his use?

CIMABUE manifested the bent of his genius while yet a boy, and forsook his studies for the more congenial occupation of drawing men, horses, buildings, &c., on the books and papers entrusted to him for the purposes of education. In the earliest childhood of MASACCIO, he executed drawings which were preserved for a century afterwards in his native village; and of one of which, we are told, the expression was so remarkable that, once seen, it could never be forgotten. The boyish fancy of FILIPPO LIPPI, running riot in caricature, and disfiguring his own books and those of his school-fellows, in the convent of the Carmelites at Florence, attracted the attention of the prior, and led to his obtaining those facilities for the study of art, which he most ardently desired; and we find DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO asserting his fondness for artistic pursuits, by sketching, with the ease and rapidity of a practised hand, the faces of those who passed the shop of the goldsmith

to whom he was apprenticed. The casual sight of an oratory, painted by a rustic pretender to art, called forth the latent tendency of the mind of the cow-boy, ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO, who forthwith commenced scratching figures of animals on the walls, and on stones with the point of a knife, or delineating them so vigorously with pieces of charcoal as to excite the notice of a Florentine gentleman, by whose assistance he was subsequently enabled to gratify the bent of his inclinations, and acquire the mastery of the art he loved.

FUSELI inherited from his father a fondness for the art of which, in his maturer years, he became so enthusiastic a devotee. To this, his studies as a school-boy were subordinated, and the poetry of Greece and Rome, while it kindled his imagination, supplied an endless diversity of subjects on which to exercise his facile pencil. In old age he would fondly recur to the play-hours spent in poring over the works of Michael Angelo, of whose prints his father had a fine collection;-to the intense enjoyment he derived from copying those prints and others from the works of Raffaelle, late at night, by the aid of pencils which his pocket-money had been thriftily hoarded to procure, and by the light of candles purloined from the kitchen of the school at Zurich. Allan Cunningham informs us that a wild German work, called the Hour-Glass,"

rated the fancy of Fuseli while at school, and

WEST, BLAKE, BARRY, RUNCIMAN.

7

that he illustrated it with outlines, representing fantastic imps and elves, engaged in strange dances, ludicrous gambols, and mischievous tricks. The future illustrator of Shakspere and Milton was, even then, "of imagination all compact."

Few readers will need to be reminded of the beautiful incident in the childhood of WEST, watching the sleeping infant of his eldest sister, and striving to perpetuate, by a pen-and-ink sketch, the smile which flickered across the infant's face; or of that other, to him, memorable circumstance—the exhibition of his sketches-the sketches of a child of eight to the wandering Indians, on the occasion of their summer visit to Springfield, who rewarded his dawning skill, by teaching him how to prepare the red and yellow colours with which they stained their weapons.

The first glimpse we obtain of BLAKE, in reading whose life we seem listening to a strain of sweet, but mournful music, is, as a boy in the hosier's shop, in Broad Street, Carnaby Market, tracing his designs on the backs of the shop-bills, and executing his artistic fancies on his father's counter. The wayward BARRY, while a sailor-boy, neglected the duties of his marine apprenticeship, and made sketches of the coast along which he sailed, or of the groups and figures, upon the vessel's deck, to the amusement of the sailors, and the vexation of his father. RUNCIMAN, of whom it was said, that while