always conceived as consisting in a
fixed simper--feet not more than two inches long, and accessory grounds,
pony, and groom--our sentence need not be "_guarda e passa_," but
"_passa_" only. Yet one oil picture has been painted, and so far as I
know, one only, representing the deeper loveliness of English youth--the
portraits of the three children of the Dean of Christ Church, by the son
of the great portrait painter, who has recorded whatever is tender and
beautiful in the faces of the aged men of England, bequeathing, as it
seems, the beauty of their children to the genius of his child.

105. The second book which I named, Heyne's Virgil, shows, though
unequally and insufficiently, what might be done by line engraving to
give vital image of classical design, and symbol of classical thought.
It is profoundly to be regretted that none of these old and
well-illustrated classics can be put frankly into the hands of youth;
while all books lately published for general service, pretending to
classical illustration, are, in point of Art, absolutely dead and
harmful rubbish. I cannot but think that the production of
well-illustrated classics would at least leave free of money-scathe, and
in great honor, any publisher who undertook it; and although schoolboys
in general might not care for any such help, to one, here and there, it
would make all the difference between loving his work and hating it. For
myself, I am quite certain that a single vignette, like that of the
fountain of Arethusa in Heyne, would have set me on an eager quest,
which would have saved me years of sluggish and fruitless labor.

106. It is the more strange, and the more to be regretted, that no such
worthy applications of line engraving are now made, because, merely to
gratify a fantastic pride, works are often undertaken in which, for want
of well-educated draughtsmen, the mechanical skill of the engraver has
been wholly wasted, and nothing produced useful, except for common
reference. In the great work published by the Dilettanti Society, for
instance, the engravers have been set to imitate, at endless cost of
sickly fineness in dotted and hatched execution, drawings in which the
light and shade is always forced and vulgar, if not utterly false.
Constantly (as in the 37th plate of the first volume), waving hair casts
a straight shadow, not only on the forehead, but even on the ripples of
other curls emerging beneath it: while the publication of plate 41,