es
destroys the impression of atmosphere, though at a considerable
distance it is as dark as the nearest raven's wing, which cannot
relieve itself against it. This may have been done in order to obtain
a certain arrangement of black and white patches," etc. This was done
for the sheer purpose of oppositional effects. Did Hamerton see a fine
plate? The shadow is heavy; the street is in demi, not total,
obscurity; the values of the flying ravens and the shadow are clearly
enunciated. The passage is powerful, even sensational, and in the
Romantic, Hugoesque key. Hamerton is wrong. Meryon seldom erred. His
was a temperament of steel and fire.

JOHN MARTIN, MEZZOTINTER

The sitting-room was long and narrow. A haircloth sofa of
uncompromising rectitude was pushed so close to the wall that the
imprints of at least two generations of heads might be discerned upon
the flowered wall-paper--flowers and grapes of monstrous size from
some country akin to that visited by the Israelitish spies as related
in the Good Book. A mahogany sideboard stood at the upper end of the
room; in one window hung a cage which contained a feeble canary. As
you entered your eyes fell upon an ornamental wax fruit piece under a
conical glass. A stuffed bird, a robin redbreast, perched on a frosted
tree in the midst of these pale tropical offerings, glared at you with
beady eyes. Antimacassars and other things of horror were in the room.
Also a centre table upon which might have been found Cowper's poems,
the Bible, Beecher's sermons, and an illustrated book about the Holy
Land by some hardworking reverend. It was Aunt Jane's living-room; in
it she had rocked and knitted for more than half a century. There were
a few pictures on the wall, a crayon of her brother, a bank president
with a shaved upper lip, a high, pious forehead, and in his eyes a
stern expression of percentage. Over the dull white marble mantelpiece
hung a huge mezzotint, of violent contrast in black and white, a
picture whose subject had without doubt given it the place of honour
in this old-fashioned, tasteless, homely, comfortable room. It bore
for a title The Fall of Nineveh, and it was designed and mezzotinted
by John Martin.

Let us look at this picture. It depicts the downfall of the great city
upon which the wrath of God is visited. There are ghastly gleams of
lightning above the doomed vicinity. A fierce tempest is in progress
as the invading hosts break down the grea