[51] To this he evidently alludes in giving the well-known story of Columbus breaking the egg as a subscription-receipt to his Analysis of Beauty.
[52] Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose lectures are, generally speaking, the best rules conveyed in the best language, in his discourse, read December 11th, 1769, acknowledges "that old pictures celebrated for their colouring are often so changed by dirt and varnish, that we ought not to wonder if they do not appear equal to their reputation in the eyes of unexperienced painters or young students." But he asserts "that an artist whose judgment is matured by long observation considers rather what the picture once was than what it is at present. He has acquired a power by habit of seeing the brilliancy of tints through the cloud by which it is obscured."
Don Quixote, through the cloud of dirt and deformity which obscured a vulgar country wench, discovered the brilliant beauties of that peerless princess, the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso! Such is the power of enchantment.
[53] I do not know what Hogarth here alludes to; perhaps to some figure that he had threatened to paint as an exemplification of his system.
[54] In this notice of the writers by whom he was attacked, he particularly alludes to the North Briton, No. 17. As to the crooked compliments paid him by his brethren in art, they were numerous indeed.
Among his papers I found a tolerably spirited drawing in pen and ink, entitled "A Christmas Gambol from Leicester Square to Westminster Hall," representing the artist with ass's ears, stripped, and tied to a cart's tail, and an old fellow with a long wig and cat-o'-nine-tails in his hand, lashing his naked back, and exclaiming, "You'll write books, will ye!" A barber's block, fixed on a straight pole, is stuck at the head of the cart, and labelled, "Perpendicular and beautiful blockhead." The horse is led by a vulgar drayman, whose locks being so dishevelled as to form a kind of glory, are inscribed, "Lines of beauty." Over the head of the painter is this motto: "'Twere better a millstone had been tied about thy neck, and (THOU) cast into the sea."
The following specimen of polite satire and curious orthography crowns the whole:—
"N.B.—Speedily will be published, an apology, in quarto, called Beauty's Defiance to Charicature; with a very extraordinary frontispiece, a just portraiture (printed on fool's-cap paper), and descriptive of the punishment that ought to be inflicted on him that dare give false and unnatural descriptions of beauty, or charicature great personages; it being an illegal as well as a mean practice; at the same time flying in the face of all regular bred gentlemen painters, sculptures, architects—in fine—arts and sciences."
Numerous prints were published in ridicule of his system and himself.
In a set of engravings, entitled "The New Dunciad, done with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste, dedicated to his friend Beauty's Analyzer," I find several prints with mottoes, which, in most vile and vulgar phrase, ridiculed both author and book. Some of them are not destitute of humour; but all would ere now have been consigned to oblivion, had not they been occasionally collected as relatives to Hogarth. One of them is entitled "Pugg's Graces, etched from his ORIGINAL daubing."