The crowning effort of Hogarth’s revenge for the abuse showered upon him by both Wilkes and Churchill was the famous etching in which the popular favourite is pilloried to all time as the type and very personification of everything false and sinister, and yet most lifelike as to resemblance; for Wilkes was himself so cynically candid as to admit in after-life that he was “growing more like his portrait every day.” The famous likeness represents Wilkes seated in a chair at a low table, on which is an inkstand and the _North Briton_, Nos. 17 and 45; he is holding the staff, topped with an inverted vessel to simulate the cap of liberty. Attitude and features are alike expressive, and, as Mr. Stephens has described it, “he leers and squints as if in mockery of his own pretences to patriotism.” When brought up from the Tower, to which Lord Bute’s party had ventured to commit him for the attack in the _North Briton_, No. 45, Wilkes was tried at Westminster, before Chief Justice Pratt--subsequently eulogized as “the champion of Freedom and Justice,” and better known to fame as Lord Camden,--who caused the prisoner to be discharged, to the frantic delight of the populace. It was on this occasion that Hogarth secured his opportunity of sketching the idol of the people and the thorn of the Court. In a note prefixed to “An Epistle to William Hogarth,” by Churchill, it is averred that when Mr. Wilkes was the second time brought from the Tower to Westminster Hall, Hogarth skulked behind a screen in the corner of the gallery of the Common Pleas; and while Lord Chief Justice Pratt was enforcing the great principles of the Constitution, the painter was employed in caricaturing the prisoner. So popular was this print, issued at one shilling, that Nichols mentions “nearly four thousand copies were worked off in a few weeks.” “The Epistle” referred to was provoked by the etching of John Wilkes, “Drawn from the Life.” Hogarth is said to have felt severely the retort which the vigorous and “bruising” Churchill thought proper to make. [Illustration: JOHN WILKES, A PATRIOT. AFTER HOGARTH.] “Lurking, most ruffian-like, behind a screen, So plac’d all things to see, himself unseen, Virtue, with due contempt, saw Hogarth stand, The murd’rous pencil in his palsied hand;” etc. To this pasquinade, which revelled audaciously in the realms of libel, and was otherwise a false and indefensible attack on the artist’s private life, Hogarth characteristically replied with his graver; but not to lose time, while his mind was heated by the attack, he utilized a plate on which was already engraved his own portrait and his dog, after the painting now in the National Gallery, and burnishing out those parts which were in his way, he engraved--