ravers
to whom Cruikshank's designs have been entrusted; and next to him (if
we may be allowed to make such arbitrary distinctions) we may place
Mr. Williams; and the reader is not possibly aware of the immense
difficulties to be overcome in the rendering of these little sketches,
which, traced by the designer in a few hours, require weeks' labor
from the engraver. Mr. Cruikshank has not been educated in the regular
schools of drawing (very luckily for him, as we think), and consequently
has had to make a manner for himself, which is quite unlike that of any
other draftsman. There is nothing in the least mechanical about it; to
produce his particular effects he uses his own particular lines, which
are queer, free, fantastical, and must be followed in all their infinite
twists and vagaries by the careful tool of the engraver. Those three
lovely heads, for instance, imagined out of the rinds of lemons, are
worth examining, not so much for the jovial humor and wonderful variety
of feature exhibited in these darling countenances as for the engraver's
part of the work. See the infinite delicate cross-lines and hatchings
which he is obliged to render; let him go, not a hair's breadth, but
the hundredth part of a hair's breadth, beyond the given line, and the
FEELING of it is ruined. He receives these little dots and specks, and
fantastical quirks of the pencil, and cuts away with a little knife
round each, not too much nor too little. Antonio's pound of flesh did
not puzzle the Jew so much; and so well does the engraver succeed at
last, that we never remember to have met with a single artist who did
not vow that the wood-cutter had utterly ruined his design.

Of Messrs. Thompson and Williams we have spoken as the first engravers
in point of rank; however, the regulations of professional precedence
are certainly very difficult, and the rest of their brethren we shall
not endeavor to class. Why should the artists who executed the cuts of
the admirable "Three Courses" yield the pas to any one?

There, for instance, is an engraving by Mr. Landells, nearly as good
in our opinion as the very best woodcut that ever was made after
Cruikshank, and curiously happy in rendering the artist's peculiar
manner: this cut does not come from the facetious publications which we
have consulted; but is a contribution by Mr. Cruikshank to an elaborate
and splendid botanical work upon the Orchidaceae of Mexico, by Mr.
Bateman. Mr. Bateman despatch