Hogarth do something of this kind? If he please
himself he may not satisfy you, and if you are satisfied, none of your
friends are, who take an opportunity of the portrait to say sarcastic
things of you. For in that respect you may be most like your picture, or
it most like you, for every body will have some fault to find with it. Why,
don't you remember but last year some _friends_ poked out the eye from a
portrait, even after it had been on the exhibition walls. Then, what with
the cleaning and varnishing, you have to go through as many disorders as
when you were a child. You will have the picture-cleaner's measles. It was
not long ago, I saw a picture in a most extraordinary state; and, on
enquiry, I found that the cook of the house had rubbed it over with fat of
bacon to make it bear out, and that she had learned it at a great house,
where there is a fine collection, which are thus bacon'd twice every year.
You are sure not to keep even your present good looks, but will become
smoked and dirty. Then must you be cleaned, and there is an even chance
that in doing it they put out at least one of your eyes, (I saw both eyes
taken out of a Correggio,) and the new one to be put in will never match
the other. The ills that flesh is heir to, are nothing to the ills its
representative is heir to. At best, the very change of fashion in dress
will make you look quizzical in a few years. For you are going to sit when
dress is most unbecoming, and it is only by custom that the eye is
reconciled to it, so that all the painted present generation must look
ridiculous in the eyes of posterity. Don't have your name put on the
canvass; then you may console yourself that, in all these mortal chances
and changes, whatever happens to it, you will not be known. I have one
before me now with the name and all particulars in large gilt letters.
Happily this ostentation is out; you may therefore hope, when the evil day
comes, _fallere_, to escape notice. I hope the painter will give you that
bold audacious look which may stare the beholder in the face, and deny
your own identity; no small advantage, for doubtless the "[Greek: semata
lugra]" of Bellerophon was but his portrait, which, by a hang-look
expression, intimatd death. Your painter may be ignorant of phrenology,
and, without knowing it, may give you some detestable bumps; and your
picture may be borrowed to lecture upon, at inns and institutions, and
anecdotes rummaged up or forged, to m