"Let the picture rust; Perhaps Time's price-enhancing dust, As statues moulder into earth, When I'm no more, may mark its worth; And future connoisseurs may rise, Honest as ours, and full as wise, To puff the piece, and painter too, And make me _then_ what Guido's _now_." --_Hogarth's Epistle._ [Illustration: SIGISMUNDA.] A competition with either Guido or Furino would to any modern painter be _an enterprise of danger_: to Hogarth it was more peculiarly so, from the public justly conceiving that the representation of elevated distress was not his _forte_, and his being surrounded by an _host of foes_, who either dreaded satire or envied genius. The connoisseurs considering the challenge as too insolent to be forgiven,--_before his picture appeared_, determined to decry it. The painters rejoiced in his attempting what was likely to end in disgrace; and to satisfy those who had formed their ideas of Sigismunda upon the inspired page of Dryden, was no easy task. The bard has consecrated the character, and his heroine glitters with a brightness that cannot be transferred to the canvas. Mr. Walpole's description, though equally radiant, is too _various_ for the utmost powers of the pencil. Hogarth's Sigismunda, as this gentleman poetically expresses it, "_has none of the sober grief, no dignity of suppressed anguish, no involuntary tear, no settled meditation on the fate she meant to meet, no amorous warmth turned holy by despair; in short, all is wanting that should have been there, all is there that such a story would have banished from a mind capable of conceiving such complicated woe; woe so sternly felt, and yet so tenderly_." This glowing picture presents to the mind a being whose contending passions may be felt, but were not delineated even by Correggio. Had his tints been aided by the grace and greatness of Raphael, they must have failed.