In 1761 Hogarth was sixty-five years of age, and he had but three years more to live. These three years were embittered by an unhappy quarrel with his quondam friends, John Wilkes and Churchill the poet, over which most of his biographers are contented to pass rapidly. Having succeeded John Thornhill in 1757 as serjeant painter (to which post he was reappointed at the accession of George III.), an evil genius prompted him in 1762 to do some "timed" thing in the ministerial interest, and he accordingly published the indifferent satire of "The Times, plate i." This at once brought him into collision with Wilkes and Churchill, and the immediate result was a violent attack upon him, both as a man and an artist, in the opposition _North Briton_, No. 17. The alleged decay of his powers, the miscarriage of Sigismunda, the cobbled composition of the _Analysis_, were all discussed with scurrilous malignity by those who had known his domestic life and learned his weaknesses. The old artist was deeply wounded, and his health was failing. Early in the next year, however, he replied by that portrait of Wilkes which will for ever carry his squinting features to posterity. Churchill retaliated in July by a savage _Epistle to William Hogarth_, to which the artist rejoined by a print of Churchill as a bear, in torn bands and ruffles, not the most successful of his works. "The pleasure, and pecuniary advantage," writes Hogarth manfully, "which I derived from these two engravings" (of Wilkes and Churchill), "together with occasionally riding on horseback, restored me to as much health as can be expected at my time of life." He produced but one more print, that of "Finis, or The Bathos," March 1764, a strange jumble of "fag ends," intended as a tail-piece to his collected prints; and on the 26th October of the same year he died of an aneurism at his house in Leicester Square. His wife, to whom he left his plates as a chief source of income, survived him until 1789. He was buried in Chiswick churchyard, where a tomb was erected to him by his friends in 1771, with an epitaph by Garrick. Not far off, on the road to Chiswick Gardens, still stands the little red-brick Georgian villa in which from September 1749 until his death he spent the summer seasons. After many vicissitudes and changes of ownership it was purchased in 1902 by Lieut.-Colonel Shipway of Chiswick, who turned it into a Hogarth museum and preserved it to the nation.