e, with
delight to the eye in the method of translation; and the language of
engraving, when once you begin to understand it, is, in these respects,
so fertile, so ingenious, so ineffably subtle and severe in its grammar,
that you may quite easily make it the subject of your life's
investigation, as you would the scholarship of a lovely literature.

But in doing this, you would withdraw, and necessarily withdraw, your
attention from the higher qualities of art, precisely as a grammarian,
who is that, and nothing more, loses command of the matter and substance
of thought. And the exquisitely mysterious mechanisms of the engraver's
method have, in fact, thus entangled the intelligence of the careful
draughtsmen of Europe; so that since the final perfection of this
translator's power, all the men of finest patience and finest hand have
stayed content with it;--the subtlest draughtsmanship has perished from
the canvas,[Z] and sought more popular praise in this labyrinth of
disciplined language, and more or less dulled or degraded thought. And,
in sum, I know no cause more direct or fatal, in the destruction of the
great schools of European art, than the perfectness of modern line
engraving.

122. This great and profoundly to be regretted influence I will prove
and illustrate to you on another occasion. My object to-day is to
explain the perfectness of the art itself; and above all to request you,
if you will not look at pictures instead of photographs, at least not to
allow the cheap merits of the chemical operation to withdraw your
interest from the splendid human labor of the engraver. Here is a little
vignette from Stothard, for instance, in Rogers' poems, to the lines,

"Soared in the swing, half pleased and half afraid,
'Neath sister elms, that waved their summer shade."

You would think, would you not? (and rightly,) that of all difficult
things to express with crossed black lines and dots, the face of a young
girl must be the most difficult. Yet here you have the face of a bright
girl, radiant in light, transparent, mysterious, almost breathing,--her
dark hair involved in delicate wreath and shade, her eyes full of joy
and sweet playfulness,--and all this done by the exquisite order and
gradation of a very few lines, which, if you will examine them through a
lens, you find dividing and checkering the lip, and cheek, and chin, so
strongly that you would have fancied they could only produce the effect
of a