Note 158 — HOGARTH ILLUSTRATED. (continued 3)

Equally memorable was his reply to a friend who requested him to sit to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and have his portrait placed in Guildhall, being then so popular a character that the Court of Aldermen would willingly have paid the expense. "No," replied he, "No! they shall never have a delineation of my face, that will carry to posterity so damning a proof of what it was. Who knows but a time may come when some future Horace Walpole will treat the world with another quarto volume of historic doubts, in which he may prove that the numerous squinting portraits on tobacco papers and halfpenny ballads, inscribed with the name of John Wilkes, are 'a weak invention of the enemy,' for that I was not only unlike them, but, if any inference can be drawn from the general partiality of the fair sex, the handsomest man of the age I lived in."