with being your friend. Flaxman cannot deny that one of the very first monuments he did I gratuitously designed for him; at the same time he was blasting my character as an artist to Macklin, my employer, as Macklin told me at the time, and posterity will know. Many people are so foolish as to think they can wound Mr. Fuseli over my shoulder: they will find themselves mistaken; they could not wound even Mr. Barry so.
In a commercial nation, impostors are abroad in all professions; these are the greatest enemies of genius. In the art of painting these impostors sedulously propagate an opinion that great inventors cannot execute. This opinion is as destructive of the true artist as it is false by all experience. Even Hogarth cannot be either copied or improved. Can Anglus never discern perfection but in a journeyman labourer?
P.S.—I do not believe that this absurd opinion ever was set on foot till, in my outset into life, it was artfully published, both in whispers and in print, by certain persons whose robberies from me made it necessary to them that I should be hid in a corner. It never was supposed that a copy could be better than an original, or near so good, till, a few years ago, it became the interest of certain knaves. The lavish praise I have received from all quarters for invention and drawing has generally been accompanied by this: 'He can conceive, but he cannot execute.' This absurd assertion has done me, and may still do me, the greatest mischief. I call for public protection against these villains. I am, like others, just equal in invention and in execution, as my works show. I, in my own defence, challenge a competition with the finest engravings, and defy the most critical judge to make the comparison honestly: asserting, in my own defence, that this print is the finest that has been done, or is likely to be done, in England, where drawing, the foundation, is condemned, and absurd nonsense about dots and lozenges and clean strokes made to occupy the attention to the neglect
