what you please—we assume that Hogarth was a Hellenist because he once sent, as a dinner invite to a friend, a card on which he had sketched a knife, fork, and pasty, and these words, "Come and Eta Beta Pi." No wonder the [Greek: ethos] puzzled him. He was not deeply learned in anything save human nature, and of this knowledge even he may have been half unconscious, thinking himself to be more historical painter than philosopher. He never was a connoisseur. He was shamefully disrespectful to the darkened daubs which the picture-quacks palmed on the curious of the period as genuine works of the old masters. He painted "Time smoking a picture," and did not think much of the collection of Sir Luke Schaub. His knowledge of books was defective; although another scholiast (not Warton) proved, in a most learned pamphlet, that he had illustrated, sans le savoir, above five hundred passages in Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid. He had read Swift. He had illustrated and evidently understood Hudibras. He was afraid of Pope, and only made a timid, bird-like, solitary dash at him in one of his earliest charges; and, curiously, Alexander the Great of Twickenham seemed to be afraid of Hogarth, and shook not the slightest drop of his gall vial over him. What a quarrel it might have been between the acrimonious little scorpion of "Twitnam," and the sturdy bluebottle of Leicester Fields! Imagine Pope versus Hogarth, pencil against pen; not when the painter was old and feeble, half but not quite doting indeed, as when he warred with Wilkes and Churchill, but in the strength and pride of his swingeing satire. Perhaps William and Alexander respected one another; but I think there must have been some tacit "hit me and I'll hit you" kind of rivalry between them, as between two cocks of two different schools who meet now and then on the public promenades—meet with a significant half-smile and a clenching of the fist under the cuff of the jacket.
To the end of his life Hogarth could not spell; at least, his was not the orthography expected from educated persons in a polite age. In almost the last plate he engraved, the famous portrait of Churchill as a Bear, the "lies," with which the knots of Bruin's club are inscribed, are all "lyes." This may be passed over, considering how very lax and vague were our orthographical canons not more than a century ago, and how many ministers, divines, poets—nay, princes, and crowned heads, and nabobs—permitted themselves greater liberties than "lye" for "lie" in the Georgian era. At this I have elsewhere hinted, and I think the biographers of Hogarth are somewhat harsh in accusing him of crass ignorance, when he only wrote as My Lord Keeper, or as Lady Betty, or as his grace the Archbishop was wont to write. Hogarth, too, was an author. He published a book—to say nothing of the manuscript notes of his life he left. The whole structure, soul, and strength of the Analysis of Beauty are undoubtedly his; although he very probably profited by the assistance—grammatical as well as critical—of some of the clerical dignitaries who loved the good man. That he did so has been positively asserted; but it
