es with the treacherous chemistry of their acids, and need an
invincible patience. Even Meryon was always very anxious when the time
came for confiding his work to what he called the _traitresse liqueur_;
and whenever I give a commission to an etcher, I am always expecting
some such despatch as the following: "Plate utterly ruined in the
biting. Very sorry. Will begin another immediately." We know what a
dreadful series of mishaps attended our fresco-painters at Westminster,
and now even the promising water-glass process, in which Maclise
trusted, shows the bloom of premature decay. The safest and best known
of modern processes, simple oil-painting has its own dangers also. The
colors sink and alter; they lose their relative values; they lose their
pearly purity, their glowing transparence--they turn to buff and black.
The fine arts bristle all over with technical difficulties, and are, I
will not say the best school of patience in the world, for many other
pursuits are also very good schools of patience; but I will say, without
much fear of contradiction from anybody acquainted with the subject,
that the fine arts offer drudgery enough, and disappointment enough, to
be a training both in patience and in humility.

In the labor of the line-engraver both these qualities are developed to
the pitch of perfect heroism. He sits down to a great surface of steel
or copper, and day by day, week after week, month after month, ploughs
slowly his marvellous lines. Sometimes the picture before him is an
agreeable companion; he is in sympathy with the painter; he enjoys every
touch that he has to translate. But sometimes, on the contrary, he hates
the picture, and engraves it as a professional duty. I happened to call
upon a distinguished English engraver--a man of the greatest taste and
knowledge, a refined and cultivated critic--and I found him seated at
work before a thing which had nothing to do with fine art--a medley of
ugly portraits of temperance celebrities on a platform. "Ah!" he said to
me sadly, "you see the dark side of our profession; fancy sitting down
to a desk all day long for two years together with that thing to occupy
your thoughts!" How much moral fibre was needed to carry to a successful
issue so repulsive a task as that! You may answer that a stone-breaker
on the roadside surpasses my line-engraver both in patience and in
humility; but whereas the sensitiveness of the stone-breaker has been
deadened by his mode