It was while Wilkes was before Pratt at Westminster that, if we may accept the authority of Churchill, one of Wilkes's keenest enemies seized an opportunity for a cruel {61} revenge. Hogarth hated both Wilkes and Churchill. He had begun the quarrel by attacking the _North Briton_ and the _Monitor_ in his cartoon "The Times," executed for the greater glorification of the painter's patron, Lord Bute. The _North Briton_ replied to this attack with a vigor which infuriated Hogarth, who had his full share of the irritable vanity which the world always attributes to the artist. In Wilkes's difficulty Hogarth saw his opportunity. Lurking behind a screen in the Court of Common Pleas, the painter sought and found an opportunity for making a sketch of Wilkes. While Justice Pratt, with what Wilkes called "the eloquence and courage of old Rome," was laying down the law upon the prisoner's plea preparatory to setting him at liberty, Hogarth's busy pencil was engaged upon the first sketch for that caricature which has helped to make Wilkes's features famous and infamous throughout the world. The print was promptly published at a shilling, and commanded an enormous sale. Nearly four thousand copies, it is said, were sold within a few weeks. The envenomed skill of Hogarth has made the appearance of Wilkes almost as familiar to us as to the men of his own time. The sneering, satyr face, the sinister squint, the thrust-out chin and protruding lower jaw belong to a face severely visited by Nature, even when liberal allowance is made for the animosity that prompted the hand of the caricaturist. The caricature was a savage stroke; to Wilkes's friends it seemed to be a traitor's stroke. Wilkes appears to have taken it, as he took most things, with composure. "I know," he wrote later, "but one short apology to be made for the person of Mr. Wilkes; it is that he did not make himself, and that he never was solicitous about the case of his soul (as Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to keep it clean and in health. I never once heard that he hung over the glassy stream, like another Narcissus, admiring the image in it, nor that he ever stole an amorous look at his counterfeit in a side mirror. His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain while it is capable of giving so much pleasure to others. I believe he finds himself tolerably happy in the clay {62} cottage to which he is a tenant for life, because he has learned to keep it in pretty good order; while the share of health and animal spirits which Heaven has given him shall hold out, I can scarcely imagine he will be one moment peevish about the outside of so precarious, so temporary a habitation, or will ever be brought to own 'Ingenium Galbae male habitat:' 'Monsieur est mal loge.'" Good-humored at the time, his good-humor persevered, and in later life he was wont to say jestingly that he found he was growing more and more like his famous portrait every day. But if it was