THE TECHNICS OF METAL ENGRAVING. 323 



reason of its recent decline. Engravers complain that pho- 

 tography and cheap woodcutting have ended their finer craft. 

 No complaint can be less grounded. They themselves de- 

 stroyed their own craft, by vulgarizing it. Content in their 

 beautiful mechanism, they ceased to learn, and to feel, as 

 artists ; they put themselves under the order of publishers 

 and printsellers ; they worked indiscriminately from whatever 

 was put into their hands, from Bartlett as willingly as from 

 Turner, and from Mulready as carefully as from Raphael. 

 They filled the windows of printsellers, the pages of gift books, 

 with elaborate rubbish, and piteous abortions of delicate in- 

 dustry. They worked cheap, and cheaper, smoothly, and 

 more smoothly, they got armies of assistants, and surrounded 

 themselves with schools of mechanical tricksters, learning 

 their stale tricks with blundering avidity. Ttuey had fallen - 

 before the days of photography into providers of frontis- 

 pieces for housekeepers' pocket-books. I do not know if 

 photography itself, their redoubted enemy, has even now 

 ousted them from that last refuge. 



140. Such the fault of the engraver, very pardonable ; 

 scarcely avoidable, however fatal. Fault mainly of humility. 

 But what has your fault been, gentlemen ? what the patrons' 

 fault, who have permitted so wide waste of admirable labour, 

 so pathetic a uselessness of obedient genius ? It was yours to 

 have directed, yours to have raised and rejoiced in, the skill, 

 the modesty, the patience of this entirely gentle and indus- 

 trious race ; copyists with their heart. The common painter- 

 copyists who encumber our European galleries with their 

 easels and pots, are, almost without exception, persons too 

 stupid to be painters, and too lazy to be engravers. The real 

 copyists the men who can put their soul into another's work 

 are employed at home, in their narrow rooms, striving to 

 make their good work profitable to all men. And in their 

 submission to the public taste they are truly national servants 

 as much as Prime Ministers are. They fulfil the demand of 

 the nation ; what, as a people, you wish to have for possession 

 in art, these men are ready to give you. 



And what have you hitherto asked of them? Ramsgate 



