f-bound volumes and sets
of apparently countless folios. Here are _Moreri, Bayle_, the _Dictionnaire
de Trevoux, Charpentier_, and the interminable _Encyclopedie_: all very
tempting of their kind, and in price:--but all utterly unpurchasable--on
account of the heavy duties of importation, arising from their weight.

However--again I say--my present business is with _Prints_. Generally
speaking, these prints are pleasing in their manner of execution,
reasonable in price, and of endless variety. But the perpetual intrusion of
subjects of studied nudity is really at times quite disgusting. It is
surprising (as I think I before remarked to you) with what utter
indifference and apathy, even females, of respectable appearance and dress,
will be gazing upon these subjects; and now that the art of _lithography_
is become fashionable, the print-shops of Paris will be deluged with an
inundation of these odious representations, which threaten equally to
debase the art and to corrupt morals. This cheap and wholesale circulation
of what is mischievous, and of really most miserable execution, is much to
be deplored. Even in the better part of art, lithography will have a
pernicious effect. Not only a well-educated and distinguished engraver will
find, in the long run his business slackening from the reduced prices at
which prints. are sold, but a _bad taste_ will necessarily be the result:
for the generality of purchasers, not caring for comparative excellence in
art, will be well pleased to give _one_ franc, for what, before, they could
not obtain under _three_ or _five_. Hence we may date the decline and
downfall of art itself. I was surprised, the other day, at hearing DENON
talk so strongly in favour of lithography. I told him "it was a bastard
art; and I rejoiced, in common with every man of taste or feeling, that
_that_ art had not made its appearance before the publication of his work
upon Egypt." It may do well for

"The whisker'd pandour and the fierce hussar"--

or it may, in the hands of such a clever artist as VERNET, be managed with
good effect in representations of skirmishes of horse and foot--groups of
banditti--a ruined battlement, or mouldering tower--overhanging rocks--
rushing torrents--or umbrageous trees--but, in the higher department of
art, as connected with portrait and historical engraving, it cannot, I
apprehend, attain to any marked excellence.[198] Portraits however--of a
particular description--_may_