Note 2 — William Hogarth: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.

To me there is something candid, naïve, and often something noble in this personal consciousness and confidence, this moderate self-trumpeting. “Questi sono miri!” cried Napoleon, when, at the sack of Milan, the MS. treatises of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered; and he bore them in triumph to his hotel, suffering no meaner hand to touch them. He knew—the Conquering Thinker—that he alone was worthy to possess those priceless papers. So too, Honoré de Balzac calmly remarking that there were only three men in France who could speak French correctly: himself, Victor Hugo, and “Théophile” (T. Gautier). So, too, Elliston, when the little ballet-girl complained of having been hissed: “They have hissed me,” said the awful manager, and the dancing girl was dumb. Who can forget the words that Milton wrote concerning things of his “that posteritie would not willingly let die?” and that Bacon left, commending his fame to “foreign nations and to the next age?” And Turner, simply directing in his will that he should be buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral? That sepulchre, the painter knew, was his of right. And innocent Gainsborough, dying: “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company.” And Fontenelle, calmly expiring at a hundred years of age: “Je n’ai jamais dit la moindre chose centre la plus petite vertu.” ’Tis true, that my specious little argument falls dolefully to the ground when I remember that which the wisest man who ever lived said concerning a child gathering shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, when the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him.