[18] Hogarth may possibly allude to Ranelagh Barret, who, I learn from Mr. Walpole, was thus employed; and, being countenanced by Sir Robert Walpole, copied several of his collection, and others for the Duke of Devonshire and Dr. Mead. He was indefatigable,--executed a vast number of works,--succeeded greatly in copying Rubens, and died in 1768. His pictures were sold by auction in the December of that year. [19] In part of this violent philippic Hogarth may possibly glance at the late President of the Royal Academy, whom, it has been said, but I think unjustly, he envied. In Sir Joshua's very early pictures there is not much to envy; they gave little promise of the taste and talents which blaze in his later works. [20] Vanloo came to England with his son in the year 1737.--Walpole's _Anecdotes_. [21] I am not sufficiently versed in the palette biography of the day to know who are the painters that these stars, etc. etc. etc. allude to. Abbé le Blanc, in his letter to the Abbé du Bos on the state of painting and sculpture in England, notices the whole body in the following _very flattering_ terms: "The portrait painters are at this day more numerous and worse in London than ever they have been. Since Mr. Vanloo came hither, they strive in vain to run him down; for nobody is painted but by him. I have been to see the most noted of them; at some distance one might easily mistake a dozen of their portraits for twelve copies of the same original. Some have the head turned to the left, others to the right; and this is the most sensible difference to be observed between them. Moreover, excepting the face, you find in all the same neck, the same arms, the same flesh, the same attitude; and to say all, you observe no more life than design in those pretended portraits. Properly speaking, they are not painters; they know how to lay colours on the canvas, but they know not how to animate it. Nature exists in vain for them; they see her not, or if they see her, they have not the art of expressing her." [22] Sir Francis Bacon somewhere remarks, that in the flight of Fame she will make but slow progress without some feathers of ostentation. [23] The rival portraits here alluded to are: George the Second, patron of the foundation, by Shackleton; Lord Dartmouth, one of the vice-presidents, by Mr. Reynolds (afterwards Sir Joshua); Taylor White, treasurer of the Hospital, in crayons, by Coates; Mr. Milner and Mr. Jackson, by Hudson; Dr. Mead, by Ramsay; Mr. Emmerson, by Highmore; and Francis Fauquier, Esq., by Wilson. To say that it is superior to these is but slight praise; independent of this relative superiority, it will not be easy to point out a better painted portrait. The head, which is marked with uncommon benevolence, was in 1739 engraved in mezzotinto by M'Ardell.