````'Let the picture rust.
```Perhaps Time's price-enhancing dust,
```As statues moulder into earth,
```When I'm no more, may mark its worth,
````And future connoisseurs may rise,
````Honest as ours, and full as wise,
````To puff the piece and painter too,
````And make me then what Guido's now.'=
To some extent the reaction he hoped for has arrived. The latter-day
student of 'Sigis-munda,' unblinded by political prejudice or private
animosity, renders full justice to the soundness of its execution and
the undoubted skill of its technique. Indeed, at the present moment,
the tendency seems to be rather to overrate than to underrate its
praiseworthy qualities. Yet, when all is said, the subject remains an
unattractive and even a repulsive one. It must be admitted also that, in
one respect, contemporary critics were right. They were wrong in their
unreasoning preference for doubtful 'exotics,' but they were right
in their contention that, upon this occasion, Hogarth had strayed
perilously from his own peculiar walk, and that so-called 'history
painting' was _not_ his strongest point. Conscientious and painstaking,
'Sigismunda' is still a mistake, although it is the mistake of a great
artist; and Hogarth's recorded partiality for it affords but one more
example of that unaccountable blindness which led Addison to put his
poems before the 'Spectator,' Prior to rank his 'Solomon' above the
'loose and hasty scribble' of 'Alma,' and Liston, whose nose alone was
provocative of laughter, to cherish the extraordinary delusion that his
true vocation was that of a tragic actor.