THE CASE OF ELIZABETH CANNING Mary Squires was also declared by her to have been the main agent in ill-using and detaining her. The gipsy, it is true, averred that at the time of the occurrence she was a hundred and twenty miles away in Dorsetshire; but Canning persisted in her statement. Among other people before whom she came was Fielding, who examined her, as well as a young woman called Virtue Hall, who appeared subsequently as one of Canning's witnesses. Fielding seems to have been strongly impressed by her appearance and her story, and his pamphlet (which was contradicted in every particular by his adversary, John Hill) gives a curious and not very edifying picture of the magisterial procedure of the period. In February, Wells and Squires were tried; Squires was sentenced to death, and Wells to imprisonment and burning in the hand. Then, by the exertions of the Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, who doubted the justice of the verdict, Squires was respited and pardoned. Forthwith London was split up into Egyptian and Canningite factions; a hailstorm of pamphlets set in, one of the best of which was by Allan Ramsay the painter; portraits and caricatures of the principal personages were in all the print shops; and, to use Churchill's words in The Ghost, Betty Canning was at least, 44 With Gascoyne's help, a six months feast. In April, 1754, however, Fate so far prevailed against her that she herself, in turn, was tried at the Old Bailey for perjury. Thirty-eight witnesses swore that Squires had been in Dorsetshire; twenty-seven that she had been seen in Middlesex. After some hesita 44 THE CURÉ'S PROGRESS tion, quite of a piece with the rest of the proceedings, the jury found Canning guilty; and she was transported for seven years. At the end of her sentence she returned to England to receive a legacy of £500, which had been left to her three years before by an enthusiastic old lady of Newington Green. Her case " is full of the most inexplicable contradictions; and it occupies in the State Trials some four hundred and twenty closely-printed pages of the most curious and picturesque eighteenth-century details. But how, from the 1st of January, 1753, to the 29th of the same month, Elizabeth Canning really did manage to spend her time is a secret that, to this day, remains unrevealed. (Henry Fielding-A Memoir.) THE CURÉ'S PROGRESS MONSIEUR the Curé down the street Comes with his kind old face,— With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair, You may see him pass by the little "Grande Place," And the tiny " Hôtel-de-Ville 44 He smiles, as he goes, to the fleuriste Rose, And the pompier Théophile. He turns, as a rule, through the " Marché " cool, And his compliment pays to the " Belle Thérèse," IN PRAISE OF HOGARTH There's a letter to drop at the locksmith's shop, There's a little dispute with a merchant of fruit, 44 That will ended be with a “ Ma foi, oui!” There is also a word that no one heard And a pale cheek fed with a flickering red 44 But a grander way for the Sous-Préfet For ever through life the Curé goes With a smile on his kind old face With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair, IN PRAISE OF HOGARTH It is neither by his achievements as an engraver, nor by his merits as a painter, that he retains his popular position among English artists. It is as a pictorial chronicler of life and manners, as a satirist and humourist upon canvas, that he makes his foremost claim upon posterity. His skill in seizing upon the ridiculous and the fantastic was only equalled by his power of rendering the tragic and the terrible. And IN PRAISE OF HOGARTH it was not only given to him to see unerringly and to select unfalteringly, but to this was added a rare and unique faculty for narrative by action. Other artists have succeeded in detached scenes of comic genre, or in isolated effects of passion and horror; but none has combined them with such signal ability, and carried them from one canvas to another with such assured dexterity, as this dramatist of the brush. To take some social blot, some burning fashionable vice, and hold it up sternly to "hard hearts"; to imagine it vividly, and body it forth with all the resources of unshrinking realism; to tear away its conventional trappings; to probe it to the quick, and lay bare its secret shameful workings to their inevitable end; to play upon it with inexhaustible ingenuity, with the keenest and happiest humour; to decorate it with the utmost profuseness of fanciful accessory and suggestive detail; to be conscious at the gravest how the grotesque in life elbows the pathetic, and the strange, grating laugh of Mephistopheles is heard through the sorriest story-these were his gifts, and this was his vocation, a vocation in which he has never yet been rivalled. Let the reader recall for a moment-not indeed such halting competitors as Bunbury and Collet, Northcote and the "ingenius" Mr. Edward Penny, but-any names of note, which during the last sixty years have been hastily dignified by a too indulgent criticism with the epithet "Hogarthian," and then consider if he honestly believes them to be in any way on a level with the painter of Marriage à la Mode. In his own line, he stands supreme and unapproached ; Nec viget quidquam simile aut secundum. (William Hogarth.) MADAME DE GENLIS MADAME DE GENLIS PAYS A VISIT OF Voltaire she [Madame de Genlis] can only say, Vidi tantum. In 1776, she was travelling for her health under the escort of M. Gillier and a German painter of the name of Ott. Being at Geneva, she wrote for permission to visit Voltaire at Ferney, and received a most gracious reply. He would resign his dressing-gown and slippers in her favour, he answered, and invited her to dinner and supper. It was the custom (she says) for his visitors, especially the younger ladies, to pale, and stammer, and even faint upon their presentation to the great man; this, in fact, was the etiquette of the Ferney court. Madame la Comtesse, although unwilling to be pathetic, determined at least to put aside her habitual simplicity, to be less reserved, and, above all, less silent. With her she took M. Ott, who had never read a line of the author, but was, nevertheless, overflowing with the requisite enthusiasm. They passed on their way the church which he had built, with its superscription of "Voltaire à Dieu," which made her shudder. They arrived three-quarters of an hour too soon, but she piously consoled herself by thinking that she had possibly prevented the penning of a few additional blasphemies. In the antechamber they discovered a Correggio, whilst occupying the place of honour in the drawing-room was a veritable signboard, upon which Voltaire was represented as a victorious archangel trampling his grovelling Pompignans and |