late to which I have just
referred. What, in the stead of such, he can and does possess, let him
consider,--and, if possible, just after examining the noble qualities of
this conscientious engraving.

234. Take up, for an average specimen of modern illustrated works, the
volume of Dickens's 'Master Humphrey's Clock,' containing 'Barnaby
Rudge.'

You have in that book an entirely profitless and monstrous story, in
which the principal characters are a coxcomb, an idiot, a madman, a
savage blackguard, a foolish tavern-keeper, a mean old maid, and a
conceited apprentice,--mixed up with a certain quantity of ordinary
operatic pastoral stuff, about a pretty Dolly in ribbons, a lover with a
wooden leg, and an heroic locksmith. For these latter, the only elements
of good, or life, in the filthy mass of the story,[BM] observe that the
author must filch the wreck of those old times of which we fiercely and
frantically destroy every living vestige, whenever it is possible. You
cannot have your Dolly Varden brought up behind the counter of a railway
station; nor your jolly locksmith trained at a Birmingham brass-foundry.
And of these materials, observe that you can only have the ugly ones
illustrated. The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or
honesty; and for Dolly Varden, or the locksmith, you will look through
the vignettes in vain. But every species of distorted folly and
vice,--the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the paltry fool, the
degraded woman,--are pictured for your honorable pleasure in every page,
with clumsy caricature, struggling to render its dullness tolerable by
insisting on defect,--if perchance a penny or two more may be coined out
of the Cockney reader's itch for loathsomeness.

235. Or take up, for instance of higher effort, the 'Cornhill Magazine'
for this month, July, 1876. It has a vignette of Venice for an
illuminated letter. That is what your decorative art has become, by help
of Kensington! The letter to be produced is a T. There is a gondola in
the front of the design, with the canopy slipped back to the stern like
a saddle over a horse's tail. There is another in the middle distance,
all gone to seed at the prow, with its gondolier emaciated into an oar,
at the stern; then there is a Church of the Salute, and a Ducal
Palace,--in which I beg you to observe all the felicity and dexterity of
modern cheap engraving; finally, over the Ducal Palace there is
something, I know not in th