ok his
pencil, and drew the portrait. For those who love a soberer history, the
third edition is ready. Mrs. Hogarth, when questioned concerning it,
said, that she remembered the affair well; her husband began the
picture--and finished it--one evening in his own house, and sitting by
her side.

"Captain Coram, the projector of the Foundling Hospital, sat for his
portrait to Hogarth, and it is one of the best he ever painted. There is
a natural dignity and great benevolence expressed in a face which, in
the original, was rough and forbidding. This worthy man, having laid out
his fortune and impaired his health in acts of charity and mercy, was
reduced to poverty in his old age. An annuity of a hundred pounds was
privately purchased, and when it was presented to him, he said, 'I did
not waste the wealth which I possessed in self-indulgence or vain
expense, and am not ashamed to own that in my old age I am poor.'

"The last which I shall notice of this class of productions, is the
portrait of the celebrated demagogue John Wilkes. This singular
performance originated in a quarrel with that witty libertine, and his
associate Churchill the poet: it immediately followed an article, from
the pen of Wilkes, in the North Briton, which insulted Hogarth as a man,
and traduced him as an artist. It is so little of a caricature, that
Wilkes good humouredly observes somewhere in his correspondence, 'I am
growing every day more and more like my portrait by Hogarth.' The
terrible scourge of the satirist fell bitterly upon the personal and
moral deformities of the man. Compared with his chastisement the
hangman's whip is but a proverb, and the pillory a post of honour. He
might hope oblivion from the infamy of both; but from Hogarth there was
no escape. It was little indeed that the artist had to do, to brand and
emblazon him with the vices of his nature--but with how much
discrimination that little is done! He took up the correct portrait,
which Walpole upbraids him with skulking into a court of law to obtain,
and in a few touches the man sank, and the demon of hypocrisy and
sensuality sat in his stead. It is a fiend, and yet it is Wilkes still.
It is said that when he had finished this remarkable portrait, the
former friendship of Wilkes overcame him, and he threw it into the fire,
from which it was saved by the interposition of his wife."

All the criticisms on Hogarth's _moral_ pictures have an air of
originality and freshness of m