[24] Thus does Hogarth pun upon the name of Mr. Ramsay, who he seems to think peered too closely into his prints, though he acknowledges that, in a book entitled The Investigator, Ramsay has treated him with more candour than any of his other opponents.
[25] Upon the death of Coram this pension was continued to poor old Leveridge, for whose volume of songs Hogarth had, in 1727, engraved a title-page and frontispiece, and who at the age of ninety had scarcely any other prospect than that of a parish subsistence.
[26] How very inferior was this to the portrait of Coram! But the genuine benevolence and simplicity which beams in the countenance of the friend and protector of helpless infancy is not calculated to strike the million so forcibly as the dramatic perturbation of a guilty tyrant. In this, as in some other cases, the purchaser seems to have paid for the player rather than the picture. It was painted for the late Mr. Duncombe, of Duncombe Park, Yorkshire.
[27] By both the artists and connoisseurs of his own day he was accused of having stolen the ideas contained in his "Essay" from Lomazzo. Several prints which were published in support of this opinion will be noticed.
[28] The fable here alluded to is entitled, A Painter who pleased everybody and nobody:
"So very like a painter drew,
That every eye the picture knew.—
His honest pencil touch'd with truth,
And mark'd the date of age and youth;"
But see the consequence: