the study of it, since the development of
the modern finished school, have been ruinous to European knowledge of
art. But I am more and more busied in what I believe to be better work,
and can only with extreme brevity state here the conclusions of many
years' thought.

These, in several important particulars, have been curiously enforced on
me by the carelessness shown by the picture dealers about the copies
from Turner which it has cost Mr. Ward and me[BL] fifteen years of study
together to enable ourselves to make. "They are only copies," say
they,--"nobody will look at them."

230. It never seems to occur even to the most intelligent persons that
an engraving also is 'only a copy,' and a copy done with refusal of
color, and with disadvantage of means in rendering shade. But just
because this utterly inferior copy can be reduplicated, and introduces a
different kind of skill, in another material, people are content to lose
all the composition, and all the charm, of the original,--so far as
these depend on the chief gift of a _painter_,--color; while they are
gradually misled into attributing to the painter himself qualities
impertinently added by the engraver to make his plate popular: and,
which is far worse, they are as gradually and subtly prevented from
looking, in the original, for the qualities which engraving could never
render. Further, it continually happens that the very best
color-compositions engrave worst; for they often extend colors over
great spaces at equal pitch, and the green is as dark as the red, and
the blue as the brown; so that the engraver can only distinguish them by
lines in different directions, and his plate becomes a vague and dead
mass of neutral tint; but a bad and forced piece of color, or a piece of
work of the Bolognese school, which is everywhere black in the shadows,
and colorless in the lights, will engrave with great ease, and appear
spirited and forcible. Hence engravers, as a rule, are interested in
reproducing the work of the worst schools of painting.

Also, the idea that the merit of an engraving consisted in light and
shade, has prevented the modern masters from even attempting to render
works dependent mainly on outline and expression; like the early
frescoes, which should indeed have been the objects of their most
attentive and continual skill: for outline and expression are entirely
within the scope of engraving; and the scripture histories of an aisle
of a cloister