." Is the thing worth it? There is no
excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full,
and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.

69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for its red and
green dragons:--men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the
thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book
of English verses, published--there is no occasion to say when. It is
full of costliest engravings--large, skillful, appallingly laborious;
dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,--smoothed through
gradations like clouds,--graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by
all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a
series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can
coin in sickliest indolence,--ball-room amours, combats of curled
knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties,
charities in costume,--a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish
vanity--impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir,
and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as
such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural
veracity; the faces falsely drawn--the lights falsely cast--the forms
effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in
the vicious scum of lying sensation.

And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass
of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in;
engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the
Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the
passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.

70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our
tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing,
buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but
disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the
great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain
to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists
no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great
work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been
thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy
memorial transcript but Le Febre's. The Cartoons have been multiplied
in false readings; never in faithful ones till lat