f coal--and white wings out of hot
water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if
it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!

55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of
yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give
them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in
figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by
dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will
take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any
good workshop--the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate
being of course responsible only for the general method, for the
sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches
if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury
and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]

56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced
by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what
printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is
something complacent, sympathetic, and helpful in the nature of steel;
so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an
achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes
out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the
plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is
developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close
at that engraving--imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and
yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel
point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or
twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in
a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what
you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be.
You must _feel_ what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you
have got to do; how deep--how broad--how far apart--your lines must be,
etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply
all you must know). But suppose the plate _were_ only a pen drawing:
take your pen--your finest--and just try to copy the leaves that
entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always
that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to
that of fine