The reader may not improbably hear it said, by persons who are incapable of maintaining an honest argument, and, therefore, incapable of understanding or believing the honesty of an adversary, that I have caricatured, or unfairly chosen, the examples I give of the masters I depreciate. It is evident, in the first place, that I could not, if I were even cunningly disposed, adopt a worse policy than in so doing; for the discovery of caricature or falsity in my representations, would not only invalidate the immediate statement, but the whole book; and invalidate it in the most fatal way, by showing that all I had ever said about “truth” was hypocrisy, and that in my own affairs I expected to prevail by help of lies. Nevertheless it necessarily happens, that in endeavours to facsimile any work whatsoever, bad or good, some changes are induced from the exact aspect of the original. These changes are, of course, sometimes harmful, sometimes advantageous; the bad thing generally gains; the good thing always loses: so that I am continually tormented by finding, in my plates of contrasts, the virtue and vice I exactly wanted to talk about, eliminated from both examples. In some cases, however, the bad thing will lose also, and then I must either cancel the plate, or increase the cost of the work by preparing another (at a similar risk), or run the chance of incurring the charge of dishonest representation.