ut your knowledge of drawing will, I believe,
enable you to try your hand at a somewhat more important exercise. Let
us suppose, then, that you are to draw a landscape, although the
practice you are about to acquire applies to all other subjects equally
well. Will you reproduce this design by Claude Lorrain? (Pl. II.) It is
a composition full of charm and color, and very harmonious in effect.
Use only one needle, and keep your work close together in the distance
and more open in the foreground. (See Pl. I^_a_.) That appears
paradoxical to you; but the nitric acid will soon tell you why this is
so. I shall indicate to you, after your plate has been bitten, those
cases in which you will have to proceed differently, or, in other words,
in which you will have to draw your lines nearer together or farther
apart without regard to the different distances. I cannot explain this
subject more fully before you have become acquainted with the process of
biting in, as without this knowledge it must remain unintelligible to
you. This remark holds good, also, of what I have told you on the
subject of the needles of different degrees of sharpness.

"It is curious, my dear sir, to notice how at one and the same time the
point combines a certain degree of softness and of precision; those who
draw with the pen ought also to be admirers of etching. It seems to me,
however, that my lines are too thick; I have already laid several of
them, and the varnish is no longer visible; I am afraid I have taken it
up altogether."

You need not feel any uneasiness about that; it is simply owing to the
irradiation of the copper, the brilliancy of which the screen does not
completely subdue. The bright line is made to look broader than it
really is by the brilliant gloss of the metal. But if you lay a piece of
tracing-paper on the plate you will see the lines as they really are;
that is to say, with plenty of space between them. By the aid of a lens
you can convince yourself still more easily; you will often have
occasion to avail yourself of this instrument to enable you to do fine
work with greater facility, or to give you a better insight into what
you have already done.

As the irradiation of which we have just spoken is apt to deceive us in
regard to the quantity of the work done, we may happen to find less of
it than we expected when the plate has been bitten. Plates which to the
beginner seem to be quite elaborately worked, present to the acid l