Besides your own defects, you have to encounter the painter's. His unsteady, uncertain hand, may add an inch to your nose before you are aware of it. It is quite notorious that few painters paint both eyes of the same size; and after your utmost efforts to look straight in his face, he may make you squint for ever, and not see that he has done so. Unless he be himself a sensible man, he will be sure to make you look like a fool. Then, what is like to-day will be unlike to-morrow. His megillups will change, so that in six months you may look like a copper Indian; or the colours may fade, and leave you the ghost of what you were. Again, he may paint you lamentably like, odiously like, yet give you a sinister expression, or at least an unpleasant one. Then, if you remonstrate, he is offended; if you refuse to take it, he writes you word that if not paid for and removed by next Tuesday, he will add a tail to it, and dispose of it to Mr Polito. Did not 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