Mr. Wilkes, in the _North Briton_ above quoted, calls him the supposed author of the _Analysis_. By some he was said to have borrowed a part of the work, and by others to have stolen the whole; nay, I have more than once been seriously assured that every line was written by his friends. To this I can now reply in a style similar to that of the peripatetic, who, being told by a philosopher that there was no such thing as motion, gravely rose from his seat and walked across the room. I can produce the original manuscript, with the red chalk corrections by his own hand.[3] This supplement to that work, Hogarth wrote to vindicate himself from these and similar aspersions. In explaining his motives, he is led into stating his professional opinions; and in that part which relates to the Royal Academy, predicts that, on the plan they set out, the institution could never be of material use to the Arts. For one who is neither artist, associate, nor academician, to assert that Hogarth's prophecy is fulfilled, might be deemed too assuming. But, with little more claim to connoisseurship than I derive from a long and unreserved intimacy with some of the first painters of this country, I am led to fear that the wish their late President expressed in his first discourse is not likely to be speedily realized. He hopes that "the present age may vie in Arts with that of Leo the Tenth; and that 'the dignity of the dying Art' (to make use of an expression of Pliny) may be revived under the reign of George the Third." This discourse was read in 1769; yet (let it not be told in Gath, nor whispered in the streets of Askelon), when in 1797 the students of the Royal Academy produced their drawings for the silver medal, not one of them was found worthy of the prize; and what (considering the recent discovery of the Venetian secret) was still more strange, all the pictures sent by the candidates for the prize of painting were rejected, and voted out of the room! This circumstance the Professor of Painting has recorded in his letter to the Dilettanti Society, and candidly admits that the fault does not lie with the students, but is in the Institution! If it should be thought that Hogarth, in the course of his narration, seems too tremblingly alive, and sometimes offended where offence was not meant, let it be recollected that he must have felt superior to men whom the public preferred. To rank him with Kent, Jervas, Highmore, Hudson, Hayman, or any of that school of mannerists who figured in the different periods of his life, is classing a giant among pigmies. His works will bear the relative test of times when the Arts may be higher than they were then or are now; and I am fully conscious that this Memoir must derive its principal interest from the celebrity of the artist, who, like Louis de Camoëns, was a distinguished actor in the scenes he describes. ANECDOTES OF AN ARTIST, _WHO HELD, AS 'TWERE, THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE_.