_chagrin_ I have since undergone." And Smollett was a popular writer!
POPE'S solemn declaration in the preface to his collected works comes by
no means short of Smollett's avowal. HUME'S philosophical indifference
could often suppress that irritability which Pope and Smollett fully
indulged.

[Footnote A: See Ramazini, "De Morbis Artificium Diatriba," which Dr.
James translated in 1750. It is a sad reflection, resulting from this
curious treatise, that the arts entail no small mischief upon their
respective workmen; so that the means by which they live are too often the
occasion of their being hurried out of the world.]

But were the feelings of HUME more obtuse, or did his temper, gentle as it
was by constitution, bear, with a saintly patience, the mortifications his
literary life so long endured? After recomposing two of his works, which
incurred the same neglect in their altered form, he raised the most
sanguine hopes of his History, but he tells us, "miserable was my
disappointment!" Although he never deigned to reply to his opponents, yet
they haunted him; and an eye-witness has thus described the irritated
author discovering in conversation his suppressed resentment--"His
forcible mode of expression, the brilliant quick movements of his eyes,
and the gestures of his body," these betrayed the pangs of contempt, or of
aversion! HOGARTH, in a fit of the spleen, advertised that he had
determined not to give the world any more original works, and intended to
pass the rest of his days in painting portraits. The same advertisement is
marked by farther irritability. He contemptuously offers the purchasers of
his "Analysis of Beauty," to present them _gratis_ with "an eighteenpenny
pamphlet," published by Ramsay the painter, written in opposition to
Hogarth's principles. So untameable was the irritability of this great
inventor in art, that he attempts to conceal his irritation by offering to
dispose gratuitously of the criticism which had disturbed his nights.[A]

[Footnote A: Hogarth was not without reason for exasperation. He was
severely attacked for his theories about the curved line of beauty, which
was branded as a foolish attempt to prove crookedness elegant, and himself
vulgarly caricatured. It was even asserted that the theory was stolen from
Lomazzo. ED.]

Parties confederate against a man of genius,--as happened to Corneille, to
D'Avenant,[A] and Milton; and a Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed of
a R