APPENDIX. 



ARTICLE I. 



NOTES ON THE PRESENT STATE OF ENGRAVING IN ENGLAND. 



I HAVE long deferred the completion of this book, because I 

 had hoped to find time to show, in some fulness, the grounds 

 for my conviction that engraving, and the study of it, since 

 the development of the modern finished school, have been 

 ruinous to European knowledge of art. But I am more and 

 more busied in what I believe to be better work, and can only 

 with extreme brevity state here the conclusions of many years' 

 thought. 



These, in several important particulars, have been curiously 

 enforced on me by the carelessness shown by the picture 

 dealers about the copies from Turner which it has cost Mr. 

 Ward and me * fifteen years of study together to enable our- 

 selves to make. " They are only copies," say they, " nobody 

 will look at them." 



It never seems to occur even to the most intelligent persons 

 that an engraving also is ' only a copy,' and a copy done with 

 refusal of colour, and with disadvantage of means in render- 

 ing shade. But just because this utterly inferior copy can be 

 reduplicated, and introduces a different kind of skill in 

 another material, people are content to lose all the composi- 

 tion, and all the charm, of the original, so far as these de- 

 pend on the chief gift of a painter, colour ; while they are 

 gradually misled into attributing to the painter himself quali- 

 ties impertinently added by the engraver to make his plate 

 popular : and, which is far worse, they are as gradually and 

 * See note to the close of this article, p. 152. 



