THE BELLA CRUSCA SCHOOL OF ENGRAVING. 375 



does not prove that the gross produce of the soil has not immeasurably 

 increased, though no longer exported to absentee proprietors in France 

 being consumed at home by a contented population. It would 

 be well if the exports of Ireland were to suffer such a diminution ; for 

 assuredly this would afford no evidence of national decline. The 

 cultivation of sugar has also considerably decreased in St. Domingo,, 

 from the exclusion of the produce of that island from the English 

 and other great markets of the European states. For near forty 

 years the unsettled relations of the island, towards the parent state, 

 and the necessity of maintaining an extensive military organization, 

 in apprehension of an invasion, has also weighed upon her resources, 

 and withheld from the cultivation of the soil, large bodies of the 

 people : still, under all these disadvantages, the wealth of the island 

 has immeasusably increased in recent years ; and in all the elements 

 of true national prosperity, it is certain that St. Domingo is now 

 among the happiest of the nations of the world. 



THE DELLA CRUSCA SCHOOL OF ENGRAVING. 



PAINTING, sculpture, and engraving are three different languages 

 of art, and though the last mentioned mode of conveying the original 

 text of nature, is generally considered in the light of a translation 

 from the other two, we hold an engraver bound to possess a mind 

 capable of perceiving the finest touches of truth, and of rendering in 

 his own way the textures of flesh, hair, draperies, &c. the poetry of 

 the sky, woods, and water : for if he have no eyes for any thing 

 beyond the picture he copies, he is a mere mechanic and no artist. 

 The productions of the greatest engravers prove that engraving is an 

 original art, requiring the same eye for nature in its professors with 

 which a painter ought to be endowed. The works of the inferior 

 class of engravers prove the same thing, by shewing that their failure 

 is not owing to a deficiency of manual power, but to a perversion or 

 ignorance of nature. There are many clever artists who looking at a 

 print, will see nothing in it but the peculiar carrying of the lines ; 

 they pronounce judgment on such print according to some conven- 

 tional mode of cutting those lines and we have heard them cry 

 down a work that evinced an original feeling, but varied in its exe- 

 cution from the established mechanism. It is because we perceive a 

 tendency in some of our living engravers to demean their art by 

 making it subservient to an artificial taste that we venture to consider 

 the subject with reference to its capabilities, and the errors into 

 which it is apt to fall. 



All that excessive polish so prevalent now in the small steel plates, 

 appears to us to be little better than a cover for unskilful drawing 

 we pore over it, admiring perhaps the delicate finish of the lines, till 

 the subject is forgotten, and the imagination is laid by the heels. It 

 is as if the printing of a book were so superior to its literary matter 

 that we lost the order of the sense in admiration of the type whereas 

 the reverse should be the case. The mind ought to forget the modus 

 operandi by reason of the interest taken in the subject or the know- 



