"To the present time, none of Hogarth's biographers appear to have been aware of the local habitation' of the original painting from which the artist published his etching, the popularity of which, at the period to which it alludes, was so great, that a printseller offered for it its weight in gold: that offer the artist rejected; and he is said to have received from its sale, for many weeks, at the rate of twelve pounds each day. The impressions could not be taken off so fast as they were wanted, though the rolling-press was at work all night by the week together,

"Hogarth said himself, that lord Lovat's portrait was taken at the White Hart-inn, at St. Alban's, in the attitude of relating on his fingers the numbers of the rebel forces :

Such a general had so many men, &c. ;' and remarked that the muscles of Lovat's neck appeared of unusual strength, more so than he had ever seen. Samuel Ireland, in his Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth, vol. i. p. 146, states that Hogarth was invited to St. Alban's for the express purpose of being introduced to Lovat, who was then resting at the White Hart-inn, on his way to London from Scotland, by Dr. Webster,

a physician residing at St. Alban's, and well known to Boswell, Johnson, and other eminent literary characters of that period. Hogarth had never seen Lovat before, and was, through the doctor's introduction, received with much cordiality, even to the kiss fraternal, which was then certainly not very pleasant, as his lordship, being under the barber's hands, left in the salute much of the lather on the artist's face. Lord Lovat rested two or three days at St. Alban's, and was under the immediate care of Dr. Webster, who thought his patient's illness was feigned with his usual cunning, or if at all real, arose principally from his apprehension of danger on reaching London. The short stay of Lovat at St. Alban's allowed the artist but scanty opportunity of providing the materials for a complete picture; hence some carpenter was employed on the instant to glue together some deal board, and plane down one side, which is evident from the back being in the usual rough state in which the plank leaves the saw-pit. The painting, from the thinness of the priming-ground, bears evident proof of the haste with which the portrait was accomplished. The course lineament of features so strongly exhibited in his countenance, is admirably hit off; so well has Duncombe expressed it,

'Loyat's hard features Hogarth might command;'

for his pencil was peculiarly adapted to such representation. It is observable the button-holes of the coat, &c., are reversed in the artist's etching, which was professed to be drawn from the life, &c.;' and in the upper corner of the picture are satirical heraldic insignia, allusive to the artist's idea of his future destiny."

The "satirical heraldic insignia," mentioned in the above description, and represented in the present engraving, do not appear in Hogarth's well-known whole length etching of lord Lovat. The picture is a half-length; it was found in the house of a poor person at Verulam, in the neighbourhood of St. Alban's, where Hogarth painted it eighty years ago, and it is a singular fact, that till its discovery a few weeks ago, such a picture was not known to have been executed. In all probability, Hogarth obliged his friend, Dr. Webster, with it, and after the doctor's death it passed to some heedless individual, and remained in obscurity from that time to the present.* Further observation on it is needless; for

persons who are interested concerning the individual whom Hogarth has portrayed, or who are anxious respecting the works of that distinguished artist, have an opportunity of seeing it at Mr. Rodd's until it is sold.

As regards the other portraits in oil, collected by Mr. Rodd, and now offered by him for sale, after the manner of, booksellers, " at the prices annexed," they can be judged of with like facility. Like booksellers, who tempt the owners of empty shelves, with "long sets to fill up "at small prices, Mr. R. "acquaints the nobility and gentry, having spacious country mansions, that he has many portraits of considerable interest as specimens of art, but of whom the picture is intended to represent, matter of doubt: as such pictures would enliven many of their large rooms, and particularly the halls, they may be had at very low prices."

Mr. Rodd's ascertained pictures really form a highly interesting collection of "painted British Portraits," from whence collectors may select what they please: his mode of announcing such productions, by way of catalogue, seems well adapted to bring buyers and sellers together, and is noticed here as an instance of spirited de parture from the ancient trading rule, viz.

Day Book.

smoked two pipes of tobacco-and fell into a profound slumber-and awoke no more; and the farmers reside on their lands-and the mill stands upon the stream-and the villagers rejoice that Death did "business with old Gregory.

THE BARBER.

For the Table Book.

Barbers are distinguished by peculiarities appertaining to no other class of men. They have a caste, and are a race of themselves. The members of this ancient and gentle profession-foul befall the libeller who shall designate it a trade-are mild, peaceable, cheerful, polite, and communicative. They mingle with no cabal, have no interest in factions, are open to all parties, and influenced by none;" and they have a good, kind, or civil word for everybody. The cheerful morning salutation of one of these cleanly, respectable persons is a "handsell" for the pleasures of the day; serenity is in its tone, and comfort glances from its accompanying smile. Their small, cool, clean, and sparingly-furnished shops, with sanded floor and towelled walls, relieved by the white-painted, well-scoured shelves, scantily adorned with the various implements of their art, denote the snug system of economy which characterises the owners. Here, only, is the looking-glass not an emblem of vanity: it is placed to reflect, and not to flatter. You seat your self in the lowly, antique chair, worn smooth by the backs of half a century of beard-owners, and instantly feel a full repose from fatigue of body and mind. You find yourself in attentive and gentle hands, and are persuaded that no man can be in collision with his shaver or hair-dresser, The very operation tends to set you on better terms with yourself: and your barber hath not in his constitution the slightest element of difference. The adjustment of a curl, the clipping of a lock, the trimming of a whisker, (that much-cherished and highly-valued adornment of the face,) are matters of paramount importance to both parties-threads of sympathy for the time, unbroken by the divesture of the thin, soft, ample mantle, that enveloped you in its snowy folds while under his care. Who can entertain ill-humour, much less vent his spleen, while wrapt in the symbolic vestment? The veriest churl is softened by the application of the warm emollient brush, and calmed into complacency by the light-handed hoverings of the comb

and scissors. A smile, a compliment, a remark on the weather, a diffident, sidewind inquiry about politics, or the passing intelligence of the day, are tendered with that deference, which is the most grateful as well as the handsomest demonstration of politeness. Should you, on sitting down, half-blushingly request him to cut off "as large a lock as he can, merely," you assure him, "that you may detect any future change in its colour," how skilfully he extracts, from your rather thin head of hair, a graceful, flowing lock, which self-love alone prevents you from doubting to have been grown by yourself: how pleasantly you contemplate, in idea, its glossiness from beneath the intended glass of the propitiatory locket. A web of delightful associations is thus woven; and the care he takes to "make each particular hair to stand on end" to your wishes, so as to let you know he surmises your destination, completes the charm.-We never hear of people cutting their throats in a barber's shop, though the place is redolent of razors. No; the ensanguined spots that occasionally besmirch the whiteness of the revolving towel is from careless, unskilful, and opiniated individuals, who mow their own beards, or refuse to restrain their risibility. I wonder how any can usurp the province of the barber, (once an almost exclusive one,) and apply unskilful, or unpractised hands so near to the grand canal of life. For my own part, I would not lose the daily elevation of my tender nose, by the velvet-tipped digits of my barber-no, not for an independence!

The genuine barber is usually (like his razors) well-tempered; a man unvisited by care; combining a somewhat hasty assiduity, with an easy and respectful manner. He exhibits the best part of the character of a Frenchman-an uniform exterior suavity, and politesse. He seems a faded nobleman, or émigré of the old régime. And surely if the souls of men transmigrate, those of the old French noblesse seek the congenial soil of the barber's bosom! Is it a degradation of worthy and untroubled spirits, to imagine, that they animate the bodies of the harmless and unsophisticated?

In person the barber usually inclines to the portly; but is rarely obese. His is that agreeable plumpness betokening the man at ease with himself and the worldand the utter absence of that fretfulness ascribed to leanness. Nor do his comely proportions and fleshiness make leaden the heels, or lessen the elasticity of his step, or transmute his feathery lightness of hand

to heaviness. He usually wears powder, for it looks respectable, and is professional withal. The last of the almost forgotten and quite despised race of pigtails, once proudly cherished by all ranks-now proscribed, banished, or, if at all seen, diminished in stateliness and bulk, "shorn of its fair proportions,"-lingers fondly with its former nurturer; the neat-combed, evenclipped hairs, encased in their tight swathe of black ribbon, topped by an airy bow, nestle in the well-clothed neck of the modern barber. Yet why do I call him modern? True, he lives in our, but he belongs to former times, of which he is the remembrancer and historian-the days of bags, queues, clubs, and periwigs, when a halo of powder, pomatum, and frizzed curls encircled the heads of our ancestors. That glory is departed; the brisk and agile tonsor, once the genius of the toilet, no longer directs, with the precision of a cannoneer, rapid discharges of scented atoms against bristling batteries of his own creation. "The barber's occupation's gone," with all the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious wigs!"

Methinks I detect some unfledged reader, upon whose head of hair the sun of the eighteenth century never shone, glancing his "mind's eye" to one of the more recent and fashionable professors of the art of "ciseaurie"-one of the chemical perfumers, or self-esteemed practitioners of the present day, in search of an exemplification of my description :-he is at fault. Though he may deem Truefit or Macalpine models of skill, and therefore of description, I must tell him I recognise none such. I speak of the last generation, (between which and the present, Ross, and Taylor of Whitechapel, are the connecting links,) the last remnants of whom haunt the solitary, well-paved,silent corners,and less frequented streets of London-whose windows exhibit no waxen busts, bepainted and bedizened in fancy dresses and flaunting feathers, but one or two "old original blocks or dummies, crowned with soberlooking, respectable, stiff-buckled, brown wigs, such as our late venerable monarch used to wear. There is an aboriginal wigmaker's shop at the corner of an inn-yard in Bishopsgate-street; a "repository " of hair; the window of which is full of these primitive caxons, all of a sober brown, or simpler flaxen, with an occasional contrast of rusty black, forming, as it were, a finis to the by-gone fashion. Had our first forefather, Adam, been bald, he could not have worn a more simply artificial imitation of

nature than one of these wigs-so frank, so sincere, and so warm an apology for want of hair, scorning to deceive the observer, or to crown the veteran head with adolescent curls. The ancient wig, whether a simple scratch, a plain bob, or a splendid periwig, was one which a man might modestly hold on one hand, while with the other he wiped his bald pate; but with what grace could a modern wig-wearer dismount a specific deception, an elaborate imitation of natural curls to exhibit a hairless scalp? It would be either a censure on his vanity, or a sarcasm on his otherwise unknown deficiency. The old wig, on the contrary, was a plain acknowledgment of want of hair; avowing the comfort, or the inconvenience, (as it might happen,) with an independent indifference to mirth or pity; and forming a decent covering to the head that sought not to become either a decoration or deceit. Peace to the manes of the primitive artificers of human hair-the true skull-thatchers—the architects of towering toupees-the en gineers of flowing periwigs!

The wig-makers (as they still denominate themselves) in Lincoln's-inn and the Temple, are quite of the "old school." Their shady, cool, cleanly, classic recesses, where embryo chancellors have been measured for their initiatory forensic wigs; where the powdered glories of the bench have ofttimes received a re-revivification; where some "old Bencher" still resorts, in his undress, to have his nightly growth of beard shaven by the "particular razor;" these powder-scented nooks, these legal dressing-closets seem, like the "statutes at large," to resist, tacitly but effectually, the progress of innovation. They are like the old law offices, which are scattered up and down in various corners of the intricate maze of "courts," constituting the "Temple"-unchangeable by time; except when the hand of death removes some old tenant at will, who has been refreshed by the cool-borne breezes from the river, or soothed by the restless monotony of the plashing fountain, "sixty years since."But I grow serious.-The barber possesses that distinction of gentleness, a soft and white hand, of genial and equable temperature, neither falling to the " zero " of chilli ness, nor rising to the "fever heat" of perspiration, but usually lingering at "blood heat." I know not if any one ever shook hands with his barber: there needs no such outward demonstration of goodwill; no grip, like that we bestow upon an old friend returned after a long absence,

by way of rivet, as it were, to that link in the chain of friendship. His air of courtesy keeps a good understanding floating between him and his customers, which, if ruffled by a hasty departure, or dismissal, is revived the next day by the sun-light of his morning smile!

The barber's hand is unlike that of any other soft hand it is not flabby, like that of a sensualist; nor arid, and thin, like a student's; nor dead white, like that of a delicate female; but it is naturally warm, of a glowing, transparent colour, and of a cushiony, elastic softness. Beneath its conciliatory touch, as it prepares the skin for the sweeping course of the razor, and its gentle pressure, as it inclines the head to either side, to aid the operation of the scissors, a man may sit for hours, and feel no weariness. Happy must he be who lived in the days of long, or full-dressed hair, and resigned himself for a full hour to the passive luxury of hair-dressing! A morning's toilette-(for a gentleman, I mean; being a bachelor, I am uninitiated in the arcana of a lady's dressing-room)—a morning's toilette in those days was indeed an important part of the "business of life:" there were the curling-irons, the comb, the pomatum, the powder-puff, the powderknife, the mask, and a dozen other requisites to complete the elaborate process that perfected that mysterious "frappant, or tintinabulant appendage to the back part of the head. Oh! it must have been a luxury-a delight surpassing the famed baths and cosmetics of the east.

I have said that the barber is a gentle man; if not in so many words, I have at least pointed out that distinguishing trait in him. He is also a humane man: his occupation of torturing hairs leaves him neither leisure nor disposition to torture ought else. He looks as respectable as he is; and he is void of any appearance of deceit or cunning. There is less of personality or egotism about him than mankind in general though he possesses an idiosyncrasy, it is that of his class, not of himself. As he sits, patiently renovating some dilapidated peruke, or perseveringly presides over the developement of grace in some intractable bush of hair, or stands at his own threshold, in the cleanly pride of white apron and hose, lustrous shoes, and exemplary jacket, with that studied yet seeming disarrangement of hair, as though subduing, as far as consistent with propriety, the visible appearance of technical skill-as he thus, untired, goes the never-varying round of his pleasant occu

pation, and active leisure, time seems to pass unheeded, and the wheel of chance, scattering fragments of circumstance from the rock of destiny, continues its relentless and unremittent revolution, unnoticed by him. He hears not the roar of the fearful engine, the groans and sighs of despair, or the wild laugh of exultation, produced by its mighty working. All is remote, strange, and intricate, and belongs not to him to know. He dwells in an area of peace-a magic circle whose area might be described by his obsolete sign-pole!

66

At

Nor does the character of the barber vary in other countries. He seems to flourish in unobtrusive prosperity all the world over. In the east, the clime most congenial to his avocations, the voluminous beard makes up for the deficiency of the ever-turbaned, close-shorn skull, and he exhibits the triumph of his skill in its most special department. Transport an English barber to Samarcand, or Ispahan, and, saving the language, he would feel quite at home. Here he reads the newspaper, and, unless any part is contradicted by his customers, he believes it all: it is his oracle. Constantinople the chief eunuch would confide to him the secrets of the seraglio as if he were a genuine disciple of Mahomet; and with as right good will as ever old gossip" vented a bit of scandal with unconstrained volubility of tongue. He would listen to, aye and put faith in, the relations of the coffee-house story-tellers who came to have their beards trimmed, and repaid him with one of their inventions for his trouble. What a dissection would a barber's brain afford, could we but discern the mine of latent feuds and conspiracies laid up there in coil, by their spleenful and mischievous inventors. I would that I could unpack the hoarded venom, all hurtless in that "cool grot," as destructive stores are deposited in an arsenal, where light and heat never corne. His mind admits no spark of malice to fire the train of jealousy, or explode the ammunition of petty strife; and it were well for the world and society, if the intrigue and spite of its inhabitants could be poured, like the "cursed juice of Hebenon," into his ever-open ear, and be buried for ever in the oblivious chambers of his brain. Vast as the caverned ear of Dionysius the tyrant, his contains in its labyrinthine recesses the collected scandal of neighbourhoods, the chatter of households, and even the crooked policy of courts; but all is decomposed and neutralized there. It is the very quantity of this freight of plot and detraction that renders