echo is true to a conversation of which it omits the most important
syllables and reduplicates the rest. But this truth of mere transcript
has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede
it. Delicate art of design, or of selected truth, can only be presented
to the general public by true line engraving. It will be enough for my
purpose to instance three books in which its power has been sincerely
used. I am more in fields than libraries, and have never cared to look
much into book illustrations; there are, therefore, of course, numbers
of well-illustrated works of which I know nothing: but the three I
should myself name as typical of good use of the method, are I. Rogers's
Poems, II. the Leipsic edition of Heyne's Virgil (1800), and III. the
great "Description de l'Egypte."

104. The vignettes in the first named volumes (considering the Italy
and Poems as one book) I believe to be as skillful and tender as any
hand work, of the kind, ever done; they are also wholly free from
affectation of overwrought fineness, on the one side, and from hasty or
cheap expediencies on the other; and they were produced, under the
direction and influence of a gentleman and a scholar. Multitudes of
works, imitative of these, and far more attractive, have been produced
since; but none of any sterling quality: the good books were (I was
told) a loss to their publisher, and the money spent since in the same
manner has been wholly thrown away. Yet these volumes are enough to show
what lovely service line engraving might be put upon, if the general
taste were advanced enough to desire it. Their vignettes from Stothard,
however conventional, show in the grace and tenderness of their living
subjects how types of innocent beauty, as pure as Angelico's, and far
lovelier, might indeed be given from modern English life, to exalt the
conception of youthful dignity and sweetness in every household. I know
nothing among the phenomena of the present age more sorrowful than that
the beauty of our youth should remain wholly unrepresented in Fine Art,
because unfelt by ourselves; and that the only vestiges of a likeness to
it should be in some of the more subtle passages of caricatures, popular
(and justly popular) as much because they were the only attainable
reflection of the prettiness, as because they were the only sympathizing
records of the humors, of English girls and boys. Of our oil portraits
of them, in which their beauty is