Again: "Did ever any history-painter widen or distort his figures as they are removed from the centre of his picture? Or would he draw a file of musqueteers in that manner, when the last man in the rank would be broader than high? Why would he then serve a poor column or pedestal thus, when, poor dumb things, they cannot help themselves? And are all objects exempt from the rules of perspective except buildings? Did Highmore ever so much as dream of an intervening plane when he had been drawing a family piece with four or five people in a row, so as to distort the bodies and forms of those who had the misfortune to be placed nearest to the side of the frame? And what satisfaction would it be to his customers to tell them they were only disposed by the true rules of perspective, and might be seen in their proper shape again if they would give themselves the trouble of looking through a pin hole at a certain distance, which, by learning perspective, they might be able to find in half an hour's time; or, to save themselves that trouble, they might get a painter to lug them about till their eye was brought to the proper point. He then observes, that he would not have the intervening plane wholly rejected, but that it should be laid aside when it begins to do mischief, or is of no use; for it is no doubt as necessary to painters of architecture as scaffolding is to builders; but, like the latter, is always to be taken away when the work comes to be finished; and every defect that either may have occasioned must be corrected by the eye, which is capable to judge of the most complicated objects, perspectively true, where the dry mathematics of the art are left far behind as incapable of lending the least assistance. "These things our mathematicians are strangers to,--therefore, in my opinion, have rated them too high. Dr. Swift thought mere Philos a ridiculous sort of people, as appears by a song of his on two very remarkable ones--Whiston and Ditton. I forget it particularly, but it was about the longitude being mist on by Whiston, and not better hit on by Ditton: sing Whiston, etc. etc. Ditton has wrote a good book on speculative perspective." Hogarth then alludes to Highmore's critique on Rubens' ceiling at Whitehall, and asks, "What is it but what almost every child knows, even without the knowledge of perspective? viz. that parallel lines always meet in a point, and that he has with penetration discovered. Oh, wonderful discovery! that Rubens, unskilfully, has kept them parallel in his column, to embellish which he has tacked two fibs: one, that the error was owing to the drawing them as they would appear to the eye; the other, that the historical figures are truly in perspective; whereas King James, the principal, has a head widened or distorted, though it goes off from the eye almost as much as he would have the side columns, which are the subjects of controversy."