It should be mentioned that this was not the first occasion upon which Hogarth had attacked the charlatanry of Kent. In the first plate published on his own account, in 1724—“Masquerades and {107} Operas”—he had included him in his ridicule of what Mr. Dobson calls “foreign favourites and dubious exotics.” In that plate, also, he had ridiculed “Burlington Gate,” and, curiously prompted by the spirit of prophecy, had labelled it “Accademy (_sic_) of Arts!” He had also, in the following year, burlesqued Kent’s scandalous altarpiece at St. Clement Danes, which had lately been taken down in response to the outcry against its sacrilegious impudence. By the kindness of the publisher of _The Builder_, I am enabled to reproduce a wood engraving of Burlington Gate as it actually was, which appeared in that journal on October 28, 1854. Comparing this with the cartoon, it will be seen that Hogarth did not scruple to heighten the effect of his satire by depriving Lord Burlington’s edifice of such merits as it undoubtedly possessed. So much for Hogarth in his polemic with Pope. We will now turn for a moment to Hogarth and his quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill, in which we shall find him working over an old plate as in the case of “Enthusiasm Delineated,” but with a very different object in view. Here he adopts a method {108} of retaliation which, as we shall learn from later chapters of this book, had become already customary amongst the producers of political broadsides in the seventeenth century. Hitherto Hogarth had kept clear of politics, but now, in his sixty-fifth year, he threw himself into the fray. John Wilkes had started a paper called _The North Briton_ in opposition to _The Briton_, the organ of the Tory party of which Lord Bute was the leader. Hogarth had long enjoyed Bute’s favour. He had also until now been on friendly terms with Wilkes and his henchman Charles Churchill, the poet. On September 7, 1762, taking sides with his patron, he published _The Times_ (Plate I.). This so enraged Wilkes that he retaliated on the Saturday following, in the seventeenth number of _The North Briton_, with a violent attack on Hogarth both as man and artist. In the May following Hogarth retorted by publishing a portrait of John Wilkes which, professing to be a likeness, cleverly exhibited his most repulsive characteristics. Wilkes being now on his trial for libel, Churchill came to the rescue with his savage and slashing _Epistle to William Hogarth_. This was published on August 1. {110} With a promptitude astonishing in those days of tardy copper-plate engraving, Hogarth, by a clever expedient, retaliated within a month with his exceedingly venomous print of “The Bruiser.” The plate from which this was printed had already done duty as a portrait of Hogarth himself with his dog Trump, engraved from the well-known painting now in the National Gallery. [Illustration: Burlington Gate as it appeared prior to 1868]