Those who understood
the French language communicated this information to the rest, so
that he escaped without any other chastisement than being obliged
to retire. And as they could not see the famous Descent from the
Cross till after the service was finished, they were conducted
by their domestic to the house of a painter, where they found a
beggar standing for his picture, and the artist actually employed
in representing a huge louse that crawled upon his shoulder. Pallet
was wonderfully pleased with this circumstance, which he said
was altogether a new thought, and an excellent hint, of which he
would make his advantage: and, in the course of his survey of this
Fleming's performances, perceiving a piece in which two flies were
engaged upon the carcass of a dog half devoured, he ran to his
brother brush, and swore he was worthy of being a fellow-citizen
of the immortal Rubens. He then lamented, with many expressions of
grief and resentment, that he had lost his commonplace book, in
which he had preserved a thousand conceptions of the same sort,
formed by the accidental objects of his senses and imagination;
and took an opportunity of telling his fellow-travellers, that in
execution he had equalled, if not excelled, the two ancient painters
who had vied with each other in the representation of a curtain
and a bunch of grapes; for he had exhibited the image of a certain
object so like to nature, that the bare sight of it set a whole
hog-sty in an uproar.
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