B. I. never calls the ridiculous dummy a portrait, but describes it as "the Figure," "put for" (i.e., instead of), and as "the Print," and as "his Picture," and he distinctly tells us to look not at his (ridiculous) Picture, but (only) at his Booke.
It has always been a puzzle to students who read these verses why B. I. lavished such extravagant praise upon what looks so stiff and wooden a figure, about which Gainsborough, writing in 1768, says: "Damn the original picture of him... for I think a stupider face I never beheld except D... k's... it is impossible that such a mind and ray of heaven, could shine with such a face and pair of eyes."
To those capable of properly reading the lines, B. I. clearly tells the whole story. He says, "The Graver had a strife with Nature to out-doo the life." In the New English Dictionary, edited by Sir James Murray, we find more than six hundred words beginning with "out." Every one of these, with scarcely an exception, must, in order to be fully understood, be read reversed; outfit is fit out, outfall is fall out, outburst is burst out, etc. Outlaw does not mean outside the law, but lawed out by some legal process. "Out-doo" therefore must here mean "do out," and was continually used for hundreds of years in that sense. Thus in the "Cursor Mundi," written in the Thirteenth Century, we read that Adam was "out-done" [of Paradise]. In 1603 Drayton published his "Barons' Wars," and in Book V. s. li. we read,
For he his foe not able to withstand,
Was ta'en in battle and his eyes out-done.
B. I. therefore tells us that the Graver has done out the life, that is, covered it up and masked it. The Graver has done this so cleverly that for 287 years (i.e., from 1623 till 1910) learned pedants and others have looked at the dummy without perceiving the trick that had been played upon them.
B. I. then proceeds to say:—"O, could he but have drawne his wit as well in brasse, as he hath hit his face." Hit, at that period, was often used as the past participle of hide, with the meaning hid or hidden, exactly as we find in Chaucer, in "The Squieres Tale," where we read, ii. 512, etc.,
Right as a serpent hit him under floures
Til he may seen his tyme for to byte.
This, put into modern English prose, means, Just as a serpent hid himself under the flowers until he might see his time to bite.