nt; still, it will do you a great
deal of good, sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate
texture, or gradations of tone: as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt
to incline too much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For
instance, the texture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its
tiled roof, in the vignette at p. 227 of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite
as work can possibly be; and it will be a great and profitable
achievement if you can at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at
all imitate the dark distant country at p. 7, or the sky at p. 80, of
the same volume, or the foliage at pp. 12 and 144, it will be good gain;
and if you can once draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9 of
the Italy, or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25, or the
moonlight at p. 223, you will find that even Nature herself cannot
afterwards very terribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or
moonlight.

88. You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect.
And if you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to think
that engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you to
draw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by the
difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless
habit of thinking that engraving is a mere business, easy enough when
one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of
drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is
more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is
true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it
at certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less a
habit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are trying
to copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--that
is, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made is
white instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge of
what you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good for
you, because it will awaken you to the real labor and skill of the
engraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, in this
world, who have really to _do_ anything in it.

89. Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a
model--far from it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as
well[19] before you think of doing better, and you will find many lit