The ministers in this struggle had found a powerful ally in Hogarth, who, though he had been friendly with Wilkes and Churchill, had been high in Bute's favour, even before the accession of George III, and now saw an opportunity to repay his patron. The quarrel between the painter and the agitator had begun with Hogarth's political cartoon, "The Times," in which Wilkes was ignominiously portrayed; and Wilkes, who let no man attack him with impunity, had replied in "The North Briton" with a violent onslaught upon the caricaturist. When Wilkes appeared in the Court of King's Bench, Hogarth, it is said, from behind a screen made a sketch for a caricature of the accused, in which the latter's squint was most malignantly exaggerated. Wilkes took this in good part, and, indeed, in later days said jocularly that he found himself every day growing more and more like the unflattering portrait; but Churchill, who was devoted to his friend, replied in "An Epistle to William Hogarth," in which--after the model furnished by Pope in his immortal reprimand to Addison--while praising Hogarth's genius, he poured vitriolic scorn upon his vanity and other weaknesses, concluding with a tremendous indictment of the painter's supposed dotage. "Sure, 'tis a curse which angry fates impose, To mortify man's arrogance, that those Who're fashioned of some better sort of clay, Much sooner than the common herd decay. What bitter pangs must humbl'd Genius feel In their last hours to view a Swift and Steele! How must ill-boding horrors fill her breast, When she beholds men mark'd above the rest For qualities most dear, plunged from that height, And sunk, deep sunk, in second-childhood's night! Are men, indeed, such things? and are the best More subject to this evil than the rest? To drivel out whole years of idiot breath, And set the monuments of living death? Oh, galling circumstance to human pride! Abasing thought, but not to be denied! With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought. Constant attention wears the active mind, Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind. But let not youth, to insolence allied, In heat of blood, in full career of pride, Possess'd of genius, with unhallow'd rage Mock the infirmities of reverend age; The greatest genius to this fate may bow; Reynolds, in time, may be like Hogarth now."