He was highly instrumental in promoting another good design, viz. the procuring a bounty upon naval stores imported from the colonies to Georgia and Nova Scotia. But the charitable plan which he lived to make some progress in, though not to complete, was a scheme for uniting the Indians in North America more closely with the British Government, by an establishment for the education of Indian girls. Indeed, he spent a great part of his life in serving the public, and with so total a disregard to his private interest, that in his old age he was himself supported by a pension of somewhat more than an hundred pounds a year,[25] raised for him at the solicitation of Sir Sampson Gideon and Dr. Brocklesby, by the voluntary subscriptions of public-spirited persons, at the head of whom was the late Frederick Prince of Wales. On application being made to this venerable and good old man to know whether a subscription being opened for his benefit would not offend him, he gave this noble answer: "I have not wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in self-indulgence or vain expenses, and am not ashamed to confess that in this my old age I am poor." This singularly humane, persevering, and memorable man died at his lodgings near Leicester Square, March 29, 1751, and was interred, pursuant to his own desire, in the vault under the chapel of the Foundling Hospital, where an historic epitaph records his virtues, as Hogarth's portrait has preserved his honest countenance. Hogarth thus resumes his narrative:-- "For the portrait of Mr. Garrick in Richard III. I was paid two hundred pounds[26] (which was more than any English artist ever received for a single portrait), and that, too, by the sanction of several painters who had been previously consulted about the price, which was not given without mature consideration. "Notwithstanding all this, the current remark was, that portraits were not my province, and I was tempted to abandon the only lucrative branch of my art, for the practice brought the whole nest of phiz-mongers on my back, where they buzzed like so many hornets. All these people have their friends, whom they incessantly teach to call my women harlots, my 'Essay on Beauty' borrowed,[27] and my composition and engraving contemptible. "This so much disgusted me, that I sometimes declared I would never paint another portrait, and frequently refused when applied to; for I found by mortifying experience, that whoever would succeed in this branch must adopt the mode recommended in one of Gay's fables, and make divinities of all who sit to him.[28] Whether or not this childish affectation will ever be done away, is a doubtful question: none of those who have attempted to reform it have yet succeeded; nor, unless portrait-painters in general become more honest, and their customers less vain, is there much reason to expect they ever will."