The author of the North Briton continues: "We all titter the instant he takes up a pen, but we tremble when we see the pencil in his hand."
As this essay was written in consequence of the artist giving a pictured shape, it seems rather extraordinary that so good a logician as Mr. Wilkes should drag in Hogarth's pen merely to titter at, and acknowledge that he trembles at his pencil, which instrument, by the way, drew forth this paper:—
"I will do him the justice to say, that he possesses the rare talent of gibbeting in colours, and that in most of his works he has been a very good moral satirist." That he has, it is most true. "His forte is there, and he should have kept it. When he has at any time deviated from his own peculiar walk, he has never failed to make himself perfectly ridiculous. I need only make my appeal to any one of his historical or portrait pieces, which are now considered as almost beneath all criticism."
Some of his portraits might have been exempted from this censure: what does Mr. Wilkes think of Captain Coram, now in the Foundling Hospital?
"The favourite 'Sigismunda,' the labour of so many years, the boasted effort of his art, was not human. If the figure had a resemblance of anything ever on earth, or had the least pretence to meaning or expression, it was what he had seen, or perhaps made, in real life, his own wife in an agony of passion, but of what passion no connoisseur could guess."
After asserting that the figure was not human, this is rather too much! From any gentleman, the daughter of Sir James Thornhill had a claim to more politeness; but that so gallant a man as Colonel Wilkes—a perfect knight-errant in all that related to the sex—should make an estimable and respectable woman a party "in the poor politics of the day, and descend to low personal abuse" (I use his own language), because her husband had in these poor politics adopted an opposite creed, excites astonishment!
Had this transaction passed in the year 1791, instead of the year 1762, it would have been less extraordinary; for, alas,
"The days of chivalry are no more."[132]
"All his friends remember what tiresome discourses were held by him, day after day, about the transcendent merit of this 'Sigismunda,' and how the great names of Raphael, Vandyke, and others, were made to yield the palm of beauty, grace, expression, etc. to him, for this long-laboured yet uninteresting single figure. The value he himself set on this, as well as on some other of his works, almost exceeds belief; yet from politeness, or fear, or some other motives, he has actually been paid the most astonishing sums, as the price, not of his merit, but of his unbounded vanity."