d you sufficiently from the danger either
of confusing the inferior school of chiaroscuro with that of color, or
of imagining that a work must necessarily be good, on the sole ground of
its belonging to the higher group. I can now proceed securely to
separate the third school, that of Delineation, from both; and to
examine its special qualities.

It begins (see "Inaugural Lectures," Sec. 137) in the primitive work of
races insensible alike to shade and to color, and nearly devoid of
thought and of sentiment, but gradually developing into both.

Now as the design is primitive, so are the means likely to be primitive.
A line is the simplest work of art you can produce. What are the
simplest means you can produce it with?

A Cumberland lead-pencil is a work of art in itself, quite a
nineteenth-century machine. Pen and ink are complex and scholarly; and
even chalk or charcoal not always handy.

But the primitive line, the first and last, generally the best of lines,
is that which you have elementary faculty of at your fingers' ends, and
which kittens can draw as well as you--the scratch.

The first, I say, and the last of lines. Permanent exceedingly,--even in
flesh, or on mahogany tables, often more permanent than we desire. But
when studiously and honorably made, divinely permanent, or
delightfully--as on the venerable desks of our public schools, most of
them, now, specimens of wood engraving dear to the heart of England.

34. Engraving, then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch. It is
essentially the cutting into a solid substance for the sake of making
your ideas as permanent as possible, graven with an iron pen in the
Rock forever. _Permanence_, you observe, is the object, not
multiplicability;--that is quite an accidental, sometimes not even a
desirable, attribute of engraving. Duration of your work--fame, and
undeceived vision of all men, on the pane of glass of the window on a
wet day, or on the pillars of the castle of Chillon, or on the walls
of the pyramids;--a primitive art,--yet first and last with us.

Since then engraving, we say, is essentially cutting into the surface of
any solid; as the primitive design is in lines or dots, the primitive
cutting of such design is a scratch or a hole; and scratchable solids
being essentially three--stone, wood, metal,--we shall have three great
schools of engraving to investigate in each material.

35. On tablet of stone, on tablet of wood, on tablet of steel,-