"When Mr. Wilkes was the second time brought from the Tower to Westminster-hall, Mr. Hogarth skulked behind in a corner of the gallery of the Court of Common Pleas; and while the Chief Justice Pratt,[66] with the eloquence and courage of old Rome, was enforcing the great principles of Magna Charta, and the English constitution, while every breast from him caught the holy flame of liberty, the painter was wholly employed in caricaturing the person of the man; while all the rest of his fellow citizens were animated in his cause, for they knew it to be their own cause, that of their country, and of its laws. It was declared to be so a few hours after by the unanimous sentence of the judges of that court, and they were all present.
"The print of Mr. Wilkes was soon after published, drawn from the life by William Hogarth. It must be allowed to be an excellent compound caricatura, or a caricatura of what nature had already caricatured. I know but one short apology can be made for this gentleman, or, to speak more properly, for the person of Mr. Wilkes. It is, that he did not make himself, and that he never was solicitous about the case of his soul, as Shakspeare calls it, only so far as to keep it clean and in health. I never heard that he once hung over the glassy stream, like another Narcissus, admiring the image in it, nor that he ever stole an amorous look at his counterfeit in a side mirrour. His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain, because it is capable of giving pleasure to others. I fancy he finds himself tolerably happy in the clay-cottage, to which he is tenant for life, because he has learnt to keep it in good order. While the share of health and animal spirits, which heaven has given him, shall hold out, I can scarcely imagine he will be one moment peevish about the outside of so precarious, so temporary a habitation, or will even be brought to own, ingenium Galbæ male habitat. Monsieur est mal logé.
"Mr. Churchill was exasperated at this personal attack on his friend. He soon after published the Epistle to William Hogarth,[67] and took for the motto, ut pictura poesis. Mr. Hogarth's revenge against the poet terminated in vamping up an old print of a pug-dog and a bear, which he published under the title of The Bruiser C. Churchill (once the Revd.!) in the character of a Russian Hercules, &c."
The Editor of the Monthly Review for November, 1769, in an account of Mr. Wilkes's correspondence, remarks, "The writer of this article had in substance the same relation from the mouth of Mr. Hogarth himself, but a very little while before his death;[68] and the leading facts appeared, from his candid representation, in nearly the same light as in this account which our readers have been just perusing."
I have been assured by the friend[69] who first carried and read the invective of Churchill to Hogarth, that he seemed quite insensible to the most sarcastical parts of it. He was so thoroughly wounded before by the North Briton, especially with regard to what related to domestic happiness, that he lay no where open to a fresh stroke. Some readers, however, may entertain a doubt on this subject. A man feels most exquisitely when the merit of which he is proudest is denied him; and it might be urged, that Hogarth was more solicitous to maintain the character of a good painter, than of a tender husband.
One quotation, however, from Churchill's Epistle the warmest admirers of our matchless artist must be pleased with:
"In walks of humour, in that cast of style,
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;
In Comedy, his natural road to fame,
Nor let me call it by a meaner name,
Where a beginning, middle, and an end,
Are aptly join'd; where parts on parts depend,
Each made for each, as bodies for their soul,
So as to form one true and perfect whole,
Where a plain story to the eye is told,
Which we conceive the moment we behold;[70]
Hogarth unrival'd stands, and shall engage
Unrival'd praise to the most distant age."
Hogarth having been said to be in his dotage when, he produced his print of the Bear, it should seem as if he had been provoked to make the following additions to this print, in order to give a further specimen of his still existing genius.
In the form of a framed picture on the painter's palette, he has represented an Egyptian pyramid, on the side of which is a Cheshire cheese,[71] and round it 3000 l. per annum; and at the foot a Roman Veteran in a reclining posture, designed as an allusion to Mr. Pitt's resignation. The cheese is meant to allude to a former speech of his, wherein he said that he would rather subsist a week on a Cheshire cheese and a shoulder of mutton, than submit to the implacable enemies of his country.