 the true reason.«
    The favourite of the muses, exasperated at this vexatious perseverance of
the painter, who he imagined had come thither to teize and insult him, »I would
(said he) sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, were I assured that any person had
been taken up for extirpating such a troublesome Goth as you are from the face
of the earth; and as for your boasted Cleopatra, which you say was drawn from
your own wife, I believe the copy has as much of the to kalon as the original.
But, were it mine, it should be hung up in the temple of Cloacina, as the
picture of that goddess; for any other apartment would be disgraced by its
appearance.« »Hark ye, Sir, (replied Pallet, enraged in his turn at this
contemptuous mention of his darling performance) you may make as free with my
wife as you think proper; but 'ware my works, those are the children of my
fancy, conceived by the glowing imagination, and formed by the art of my own
hands: and you yourself are a Goth, and a Turk, and a Tartar, and an impudent
pretending jackanapes, to treat with such disrespect a production which, in the
opinions of all the connoisseurs of the age, will, when finished, be a
master-piece in its kind, and do honour to human genius and skill. So I say
again and again, (and I care not though your friend Playtor heard me) that you
have no more taste than a drayman's horse, and that those foolish notions of the
ancients ought to be drubb'd out of you with a good cudgel, that you might learn
to treat men of parts with more veneration. Perhaps you may not always be in the
company of one who will hollow for assistance, when you are on the brink of
being chastised for your insolence, as I did, when you brought upon yourself the
resentment of that Scot, who, by the Lard! would have paid you both scot and
lot, as Falstaf says, if the French officer had not put him in arrest.«
    The physician to this declamation, which was conveyed through the key-hole,
answered, that he (the painter) was a fellow so infinitely below his
consideration, that his conscience upbraided him with no action of his life,
except that of choosing such a wretch for his companion and fellow-traveller.
That he had viewed his character through the medium of good nature and
compassion, which had prompted him to give Pallet an opportunity of acquiring
some new ideas
