laborate rubbish, and
piteous abortions of delicate industry. They worked cheap, and
cheaper,--smoothly, and more smoothly,--they got armies of assistants,
and surrounded themselves with schools of mechanical tricksters,
learning their stale tricks with blundering avidity. They had
fallen--before the days of photography--into providers of frontispieces
for housekeepers' pocket-books. I do not know if photography itself,
their redoubted enemy, has even now ousted them from that last refuge.

140. Such the fault of the engraver,--very pardonable; scarcely
avoidable,--however fatal. Fault mainly of humility. But what has _your_
fault been, gentlemen? what the patrons' fault, who have permitted so
wide waste of admirable labor, so pathetic a uselessness of obedient
genius? It was yours to have directed, yours to have raised and rejoiced
in, the skill, the modesty, the patience of this entirely gentle and
industrious race;--copyists with their _heart_. The common
painter-copyists who encumber our European galleries with their easels
and pots, are, almost without exception, persons too stupid to be
painters, and too lazy to be engravers. The real copyists--the men who
can put their soul into another's work--are employed at home, in their
narrow rooms, striving to make their good work profitable to all men.
And in their submission to the public taste they are truly national
servants as much as Prime Ministers are. They fulfill the demand of the
nation; what, as a people, you wish to have for possession in art, these
men are ready to give you.

And what have you hitherto asked of them?--Ramsgate Sands, and Dolly
Vardens, and the Paddington Station,--these, I think, are typical of
your chief demands; the cartoons of Raphael--which you don't care to see
themselves; and, by way of a flight into the empyrean, the Madonna di
San Sisto. And literally, there are hundreds of cities and villages in
Italy in which roof and wall are blazoned with the noblest divinity and
philosophy ever imagined by men; and of all this treasure, I can, as far
as I know, give you not _one_ example, in line engraving, by an English
hand!

Well, you are in the main matter right in this. You want essentially
Ramsgate Sands and the Paddington Station, because there you can see
yourselves.

Make yourselves, then, worthy to be seen forever, and let English
engraving become noble as the record of English loveliness and honor.

FOOTNOTES:

[X] Miller's lar