Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/250

 see him before you, and can fancy what he was—a jovial, honest, London citizen, stout and sturdy; a hearty, plain-spoken man, loving his laugh, his friends, his glass, his roast-beef of Old England, and having a proper bourgeois scorn for French frogs, for mounseers, and wooden shoes in general, for foreign fiddlers, foreign singers, and, above all, for foreign painters, whom he held in the most amusing contempt.

It must have been great fun to hear him rage against Correggio and the Carracci; to watch him thump the table and snap his fingers and say, "Historical painters be hanged; here's the man that will paint against any