Ireland, John: Hogarth illustrated (Band 3): Variety (London, 1798)

' 114, H OG A RTH.

do not fully comprehend; notwithstanding
all their pompous parade of knowledge, are
apt to wander about it and about it, per-
petually perplexing themselves and their
readers with the various opinions of other
men.

" The knowledge necessary for writing
a work on the arts, differs as much from
that acquired by the simple traveller, as
the art of simpling doth from the science of
botany. Taking the grand tour, to see and
pick up curiosities, which the travellers are
taught nicely to distinguish from each other,
by certain cramp marks and hard names,
may with no great impropriety be termed
going a simpling; but with this special dif-
ference, that your field simpler never picks
up a nettle for a marsh-mallow; a mistake
which your tour simpler is very liable to.

" As to those painters who have written
treatises on painting, they were, in general,
too much taken up with giving rules for the
operative part of the art, to enter into phy-
siological disquisitions on the nature of the