m of his defects.

In sooth he lacked variety. His pictures are sooty and apocalyptic. We
have seen the Mountain Landscape, at South Kensington, The Destruction
of Herculaneum, at Manchester, another at Newcastle whose subject
escapes us, and we confess that we prefer the mezzotints of Martin,
particularly those engraved by Le Keux--whose fine line and keen sense
of balance corrected the incoherence of Martin's too blackened shadows
and harsh explosions of whites. One looks in vain for the velvety tone
of Earlom, or the vivid freshness of Valentine Green, in Martin. He
was not a colourist; his mastery consisted in transferring to his huge
cartoons a sense of the awful, of the catastrophic. He excelled in the
delineation of massive architecture, and if Piranesi was his superior
in exactitude, he equalled the Italian in majesty and fantasy of
design. No such cataclysmic pictures were ever before painted, nor
since, though Gustave Dore, who without doubt made a study of Martin,
has incorporated in his Biblical illustrations many of Martin's
overwhelming ideas--the Deluge, for example. James Ensor, the Belgian
illustrator, is an artist of fecund fancy who, alone among the new
men, has betrayed a feeling for the strange architecture, dream
architecture, we encounter in Martin. Coleridge in Kubla Khan, De
Quincey in opium reveries, Poe and Baudelaire are among the writers
who seem nearest to the English mezzotinter. William Beckford's
Vathek, that most Oriental of tales, first written in French by a
millionaire of genius, should have inspired Martin. Perhaps its mad
fantasy did, for all we know--there is no authentic compilation of his
compositions. Heine has spoken of Martin, as has Theophile Gautier;
and his name, by some kink of destiny, is best known to the present
generation because of Macaulay's mention of it in an essay.

The Vale of Tempe is one of Martin's larger plates seldom seen in the
collector's catalogue. We have viewed it and other rare prints in the
choice collection referred to already. Satan holding council, after
Milton, is a striking conception. The Prince of Eblis sits on a vast
globe of ebony. About him are tier upon tier of faces, the faces of
devils. Infernal chandeliers depend from remote ceilings. Light gashes
the globe and the face and figure of Satan; both are of supernal
beauty. Could this mezzotint, so small in size, so vast in its shadowy
suggestiveness, have stirred Baudelaire to lines that s