ay.
Your province is the town--leave me a small outride in the country, and
I shall be content." Fielding had a different opinion of his merits: "He
who would call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter would in my
opinion do him very little honour, for sure it is much easier, much less
the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other
feature of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or
monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of man on canvas. It
hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures
seem to breathe, but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause
that they appear to think."

In answer to criticism of his _Analysis of Beauty_, Hogarth writes:
"Among other crimes of which I am accused, it is asserted that I have
abused the 'Great Masters'; this is far from being just. So far from
attempting to lower the ancients, I have always thought, and it is
universally admitted, that they knew some fundamental principles in
nature which enabled them to produce works that have been the admiration
of succeeding ages; but I have not allowed this merit to those
leaden-headed imitators, who, having no consciousness of either symmetry
or propriety, have attempted to mend nature, and in their truly ideal
figures, gave similar proportions to a Mercury and a Hercules."

Another and a better spirit influenced him in the following passage--he
is proposing to seek the principles of beauty in nature instead of
looking for them in mere learning. His words are plain, direct, and
convincing. "Nature is simple, plain, and true in all her works, and
those who strictly adhere to her laws, and closely attend to her
appearances in their infinite varieties are guarded against any
prejudicial bias from truth; while those who have seen many things that
they cannot well understand, and read many books which they do not fully
comprehend, notwithstanding all their parade of knowledge, are apt to
wander about it and about it; perplexing themselves and their readers
with the various opinions of other men. As to those painters who have
written treatises on painting, they were in general too much taken up
with giving rules for the operative part of the art, to enter into
physical disquisitions on the nature of the objects."

After this it would be unfair to withhold the praise of Benjamin West
(who succeeded Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy)--a painter,
prudent in spee