The following oracular prediction I found among his papers, in the handwriting of his friend Townley:—
"From an old Greek Fragment.
"There was an ancient oracle delivered at Delphos which says that the source of beauty should never again be rightly discovered till a person should arise whose name was perfectly included in the name of Pythagoras; which person should again restore the ancient principle on which all beauty is founded.
| " Πυθάγορας | Pythagoras. |
| " Ὄγαρϑ | Hogarth." |
THE VASE.
"Is man no more than this? consider him well."—Shakspeare.
THE VASE.
As Dr. Townley, in the foregoing mythological fragment, chooses to suppose that in the Greek particles which compounded the name of Pythagoras were to be found the letters Hogarth; Hogarth, with a whimsicality somewhat similar, sported an opinion that the first man who made a well-formed vase took another man for his model. In page 78 of his Analysis, he remarks "that the exact cross of two equal lines cutting each other in the middle, as fig. 69, would confine the figure of a man drawn conformably to them, to the disagreeable character of his being as broad as he is long. And the two lines crossing each other, to make the height and breadth of a figure, will want variety a contrary way, by one line being very short in proportion to the other, and are therefore also incapable of producing a figure of tolerable variety. To prove this, it will be very easy for the reader to make the experiment by drawing a figure or two (though ever so imperfectly), confined within these limits.