378 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



swer is, They are the finest gravers' work ever done yet by 

 human hand. You may teach, by process of discipline and 

 of years, any youth of good artistic capacity to engrave a plate 

 in the modern manner ; but only the noblest passion, and the 

 tenderest patience, will ever engrave one line like these of 

 Sandro Botticelli. 



45. Passion, and patience ! Nay, even these you may have 

 to-day in England, and yet both be in vain. Only a few years 

 ago, in one of our northern iron-foundries, a workman of in- 

 tense power and natural art-faculty set himself to learn en- 

 graving ; made his own tools ; gave all the spare hours of his 

 laborious life to learn their use ; learnt it ; and engraved a 

 plate which, in manipulation, no professional engraver would 

 be ashamed of. He engraved his blast furnace, and the cast- 

 ing of a beam of a steam engine* This, to him, was the power 

 of God, it was his life. 



No greater earnestness was ever given by man to promul- 

 gate a Gospel. Nevertheless, the engraving is absolutely 

 worthless. The blast furnace is not the power of God ; and 

 the life of the strong spirit was as much consumed in the 

 flames of it, as ever driven slaves by the burden and heat of 

 the day. 



How cruel to say so, if he yet lives, you think ! No, my 

 friends ; the cruelty will be in you, and the guilt, if, having 

 been brought here to learn that God is your Light, you yet 

 leave the blast furnace to be the only light of England. 



It has been, as I said in the note above (p. 167), with ex- 

 treme pain that I have hitherto limited my notice of our own 

 great engraver and moralist, to the points in which the disad- 

 vantages of English art-teaching made him inferior to his 

 trained Florentine rival. But, that these disadvantages were 

 powerless to arrest or ignobly depress him ; that however 

 failing in grace and scholarship, he should never fail in truth 

 or vitality ; and that the precision of his unerring hand * 



* I know no drawing so subtle as Bewick's, since the fifteenth cen- 

 tury, except Holbein's and Turner's. I have been greatly surprised 

 lately by the exquisite water-colour work in some of Stothard's smaller 

 vignettes ; but he cannot set the line like Turner or Bewick. 



