“I am not at all surprised at what you tell me.  Mengs is only liked for his talents in painting; in everything else he is well known to be little better than a fool.”

As a matter of fact he had only asked me to stay with him to gratify his own vanity.  He knew that all the town was talking of my imprisonment and of the satisfaction the Count of Aranda had accorded me, and he wanted people to think that his influence had obtained the favour that had been shewn me.  Indeed, he had said in a moment of exaltation that I should have compelled the Alcade Messa to escort me not to my own house but to his, as it was in his house that I had been arrested.

Mengs was an exceedingly ambitious and a very jealous man; he hated all his brother painters.  His colour and design were excellent, but his invention was very weak, and invention is as necessary to a great painter as a great poet.

I happened to say to him one day, “Just as every poet should be a painter, so every painter should be a poet;” and he got quite angry, thinking that I was alluding to his weakness of imagination, which he felt but would not acknowledge.

He was an ignorant man, and liked to pass for a scholar; he sacrificed to Bacchus and Comus, and would fain be thought sober; he was lustful, bad-tempered, envious, and miserly, but yet would be considered a virtuous man.  He loved hard work, and this forced him to abstain, as a rule, from dinner, as he drank so inordinately at that meal that he could do nothing after it.  When he dined out he had to drink nothing but water, so as not to compromise his reputation for temperance.  He spoke four languages, and all badly, and could not even write his native tongue with correctness; and yet he claimed perfection for his grammar and orthography, as for all his other qualities.  While I was staying with him I became acquainted with some of his weak points, and endeavoured to correct them, at which he took great offence.  The fellow writhed under a sense of obligation to me.  Once I prevented his sending a petition to the Court, which the king would have seen, and which would have made Mengs ridiculous.  In signing his name he had written ‘el mas inclito’, wishing to say your most humble.  I pointed out to him that ‘el mas inclito’ meant the most illustrious, and that the Spanish for the expression he wanted was ‘el mas humilde’.  The proud fool was quite enraged, telling me that he knew Spanish better than I, but when the dictionary was searched he had to swallow the bitter pill of confessing himself in the wrong.

Another time I suppressed a heavy and stupid criticism of his on someone who had maintained that there were no monuments still existing of the antediluvian period.  Mengs thought he would confound the author by citing the remains of the Tower of Babel—­a double piece of folly, for in the first place there are no such remains, and in the second, the Tower of Babel was a post-diluvian building.