alogy of speech further--term _dialects_. We might collect abundant
examples of these from the work of line-designers since the world began,
or compare the methods of any of the popular illustrators of to-day to
find constant variations and individual differences occurring even
among those which might be said, under the influence of a prevailing
mode, to be variations of one type.

Compare a Greek vase-painter's delicate brush line-drawing with the bold
pen-line of Albert Durer (to get a contrast in historic style). Compare
(to take two masters of different schools, but of the same country) the
line-treatment of Mantegna with the line-treatment of Raphael; or, to
take another jump, compare the line-work of Blake and Flaxman; or, to
take a modern instance, and to come to our own contemporary artists,
compare a drawing by Burne-Jones and one by Phil May.

We might construct a sort of scale of the degrees and qualities of line.

There is, for instance, outline of every degree of boldness or fineness,
from the strong black half-inch outline and upwards used in mosaic-work
and stained-glass leading; the outline of the pattern designer for
block-printing; the outline of the pen draughtsman for process-work or
woodcut; and so on, down to the hair-line of the drypoint etcher.

[Scale of Degrees in Line]

There are the _qualities_ of line in different degrees of firmness,
roughness, raggedness, or smooth and flowing. There are the degrees of
_direction_ of line, curvilinear or angular. On the angular side all
variations from the perpendicular and horizontal, or rectangle, within
which we may find all these degrees, and on the curvilinear side, all
the variations from spiral to circle: so that we might say that the
rectangle was the cradle of all angular variations of line, while the
semicircle was the cradle of all curvilinear variations. (See the
diagrams on p. 26.[f018])

[Illustration (f017): Scale of Various Degrees of Linear Weight and
Emphasis.]

Every artist, sooner or later, by means of his selective adaptive sense,
finds a method in the use of line to suit his own personality--to suit
his own individual aim in artistic expression--and in course of time it
becomes a characteristic manner, by which his work is instantly known,
like a friend's handwriting.

[Illustration (f018): Curvilinear and Rectangular Scales of Direction.]

Now what determines this choice, this