e least what meant for, like an umbrella
dropping out of a balloon, which is the ornamental letter T. Opposite
this ornamental design, there is an engraving of two young ladies and a
parasol, between two trunks of trees. The white face and black feet of
the principal young lady, being the points of the design, are done with
as much care,--not with as much dexterity,--as an ordinary sketch of Du
Maurier's in Punch. The young lady's dress, the next attraction, is done
in cheap white and black cutting, with considerably less skill than that
of any ordinary tailor's or milliner's shop-book pattern drawing. For
the other young lady, and the landscape, take your magnifying glass, and
look at the hacked wood that forms the entire shaded surface--one mass
of idiotic scrabble, without the remotest attempt to express a single
leaf, flower, or clod of earth. It is such landscape as the public sees
out of its railroad window at sixty miles of it in the hour--and good
enough for such a public.

236. Then turn to the last--the poetical plate, p. 122: "Lifts her--lays
her down with care." Look at the gentleman with a spade, promoting the
advance, over a hillock of hay, of the reposing figure in the
black-sided tub. Take your magnifying glass to _that_, and look what a
dainty female arm and hand your modern scientific and anatomical schools
of art have provided you with! Look at the tender horizontal flux of the
sea round the promontory point above. Look at the tender engraving of
the linear light on the divine horizon, above the ravenous sea-gull.
Here is Development and Progress for you, from the days of Perugino's
horizon, and Dante's daybreaks! Truly, here it seems

"Si che le bianche e le vermiglie guance
Per troppa etate divenivan rance."

237. I have chosen no gross or mean instances of modern work. It is one
of the saddest points connected with the matter that the designer of
this last plate is a person of consummate art faculty, but bound to the
wheel of the modern Juggernaut, and broken on it. These woodcuts, for
'Barnaby Rudge' and the 'Cornhill Magazine,' are favorably
representative of the entire illustrative art industry of the modern
press,--industry enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last
gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English
mob,--railroad born and bred, which drags itself about the black world
it has withered under its breath, in one eternal grind and
shriek,--gobbling,--st