especting literature and
art, would form a chronicle of singular interest. The late Mr.
Hullmandel, well known as one of the most experienced and successful
practitioners of lithography in England, resided here in 1839 and 1840,
when he discovered a new process in his favourite art, by simple mental
reasoning, upon the application of the process of copperplate aquatint to
lithographic purposes. For this discovery--and it is one of considerable
importance--he subsequently took out a patent, under the name of
lithotint. Ever since the infancy of lithography, hundreds of persons
connected with the art, beginning with its inventor himself, Senefelder,
had endeavoured to produce impressions from stone of subjects executed
with the brush, in the same manner as drawings are made with sepia, or
Indian ink. And it was natural enough that artists should have made
every effort to supersede the tedious and elaborate process by which
alone a liquid could be rendered available for the purpose of drawing on
stone. The mode of drawing technically called "the ink style," consists
merely of a series of lines, some finer, some thicker, executed on the
white surface of the stone, with ink dissolved in water, by means of a
fine sable or a steel pen, in imitation of an etching on copper. All
attempts, however, at producing variety of tints, by using the ink
thicker or thinner, failed,--the fainter lines either disappearing
altogether, or printing as dark as thick ones. In every attempt made to
use this ink as a wash, the result was still more disastrous, producing
only one dirty mass of indistinctness, amid which the original drawing
was scarcely to be traced. For twenty years did Mr. Hullmandel labour to
attain some mode of printing drawings, made by a series of washes, with a
brush, on stone, feeling this to be the great desideratum in the art.
Lithographers in Germany, in France, and in this country, had pronounced
it to be "utterly impossible;" when the idea suddenly flashed upon him,
that, if he could effect a minute granulation of the ink, by treating it
as a copperplate engraver would the ground of an aquatint plate, the
relative strength of the different washes might be preserved. He
hastened from Acacia Cottage to his printing-office in London, to put his
theory into practice, and was rewarded by the most satisfactory results.

Since that period, several prints, by this process of lithotint, were
produced by Mr. Hullmandel,