"I entertained some thoughts," he writes again, "of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the great style of history painting, so that, without having had a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own temerity commenced history painter, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew's Hospital painted two Scripture stories, _The Pool of Bethesda_ and _The Good Samaritan_, with figures seven feet high. These I presented to the charity, and thought that they might serve as a specimen to show that, were there an inclination in England for encouraging historical pictures, such a first essay might prove the painting them more easily attainable than is generally imagined. But as Religion, the great promoter of this style in other countries, rejected it in England, and I was unwilling to sink into a portrait-manufacturer--and still ambitious of being singular, I soon dropped all expectations of advantage from that source, and returned to the pursuit of my former dealings with the public at large." Few seemed disposed to recognise, in any of Hogarth's works, a higher aim than that of raising a laugh. Somerville, the poet, dedicated his _Rural Games_ to Hogarth in these words--"Permit me, Sir, to make choice of you for my patron, being the greatest master in the burlesque way. Your province is the town--leave me a small outride in the country, and I shall be content." Fielding had a different opinion of his merits: "He who would call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter would in my opinion do him very little honour, for sure it is much easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other feature of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of man on canvas. It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe, but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause that they appear to think." In answer to criticism of his _Analysis of Beauty_, Hogarth writes: "Among other crimes of which I am accused, it is asserted that I have abused the 'Great Masters'; this is far from being just. So far from attempting to lower the ancients, I have always thought, and it is universally admitted, that they knew some fundamental principles in nature which enabled them to produce works that have been the admiration of succeeding ages; but I have not allowed this merit to those leaden-headed imitators, who, having no consciousness of either symmetry or propriety, have attempted to mend nature, and in their truly ideal figures, gave similar proportions to a Mercury and a Hercules."