s a member of Parliament, without prejudice to any later action
against him.

[Sidenote: 1763--Hogarth's caricature of Wilkes]

It was while Wilkes was before Pratt at Westminster that, if we may
accept the authority of Churchill, one of Wilkes's keenest enemies
seized an opportunity for a cruel {61} revenge. Hogarth hated both
Wilkes and Churchill. He had begun the quarrel by attacking the _North
Briton_ and the _Monitor_ in his cartoon "The Times," executed for the
greater glorification of the painter's patron, Lord Bute. The _North
Briton_ replied to this attack with a vigor which infuriated Hogarth,
who had his full share of the irritable vanity which the world always
attributes to the artist. In Wilkes's difficulty Hogarth saw his
opportunity. Lurking behind a screen in the Court of Common Pleas, the
painter sought and found an opportunity for making a sketch of Wilkes.
While Justice Pratt, with what Wilkes called "the eloquence and courage
of old Rome," was laying down the law upon the prisoner's plea
preparatory to setting him at liberty, Hogarth's busy pencil was
engaged upon the first sketch for that caricature which has helped to
make Wilkes's features famous and infamous throughout the world. The
print was promptly published at a shilling, and commanded an enormous
sale. Nearly four thousand copies, it is said, were sold within a few
weeks. The envenomed skill of Hogarth has made the appearance of
Wilkes almost as familiar to us as to the men of his own time. The
sneering, satyr face, the sinister squint, the thrust-out chin and
protruding lower jaw belong to a face severely visited by Nature, even
when liberal allowance is made for the animosity that prompted the hand
of the caricaturist. The caricature was a savage stroke; to Wilkes's
friends it seemed to be a traitor's stroke. Wilkes appears to have
taken it, as he took most things, with composure. "I know," he wrote
later, "but one short apology to be made 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 Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to
keep it clean and in health. I never once heard that he 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 mirror.
His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain while it is capable
of giving so much pleasure to others. I b