of them for a hundred pounds. Correggio's 'Sigismunda!' Look at Bill Hogarth's 'Sigismunda;' look at my altar-piece at St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol; look at my 'Paul before Felix,' and see whether I'm not as good as the best of them."[1]
Posterity has not quite confirmed honest Hogarth's opinion about his talents for the sublime. Although Swift could not see the difference between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, posterity has not shared the Dean's contempt for Handel; the world has discovered a difference between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, and given a hearty applause and admiration to Hogarth, too, but not exactly as a painter of scriptural subjects, or as a rival of Correggio. It docs not take away from one's liking for the man, or from the moral of his
- ↑ "Garrick himself was not more ductile to flattery. A word in favour of 'Sigismunda' might have commanded a proof-print or forced an original print out of our artist's hands." . . .
"The following authenticated story of our artist (furnished by the late Mr. Bolchier, F.R.S., a surgeon of eminence) will also serve to show how much more easy it is to detect ill-placed or hyperbolical adulation respecting others, than when applied to ourselves. Hogarth, being at dinner with the great Cheselden and some other company, was told that Mr. John Freke, surgeon of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, a few evenings before at Dick's Coffee-house, had asserted that Greene was as eminent in composition as Handel, 'That fellow Freke,' replied Hogarth, 'is always shooting his bolt absurdly, one way or another. Handel is a giant in music; Greene only a light Florimel kind of a composer.' 'Ay,' says our artist's informant, 'but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck.' 'There he was right,' adds Hogarth, 'and so, by G———, I am, give me my time and let me choose my subject."—Works by Nichols and Steevens, vol. i. pp. 236, 237.
