Strutt’s Sglva Britannica. 549 
them ; — the artist in this case not being obliged, like the cal- 
cographer, to pore laboriously over a smoked and murky 
plate, to the injury of his eyesight ; but having, on the con- 
trary, a fair, clean, light-coloured surface on which to trace 
his subject, and work at his ease ;— these circumstances, com- 
bined perhaps with the novelty of the method, have induced 
tyros of all descriptions, who could wield a pencil, as well as 
artists of no mean pretensions, to essay their hand on stone. 
And the consequence has been, that the windows of the print- 
shops have teemed again, ‘ usque ad nauseam,” with the 
crudest productions of art, and the very counters within have 
groaned beneath the heaps of trash that have issued from the 
lithographic press. ‘There were, of course, exceptions: but 
nine tenths of the stone engravings with which we have been 
inundated, it may be safely pronounced, scarcely came up to 
mediocrity ; and were fit only to find a place in the portfolio of 
a child, or, at most, to adorn, —we might rather say disfigure,— 
that motley and multifarious receptacle for the works of genius, 
which, in modern days, young ladies term a * scrap-book.” 
We never, indeed, for a moment disputed the ingenuity of the 
invention, or denied its obvious utility in taking off, with des- 
patch, and at a cheap rate, the more ordinary sort of prints, 
such as plans and mere explanatory illustrations, and other 
articles in which no very high degree of exquisite workman- 
ship or pictorial effect was either aimed at or required. And 
we were always of opinion, too, that stone engraving was 
admirably calculated for the purpose of executing such out- 
lines of subjects of natural history * as are designed to be 
afterwards filled up and coloured by hand; the soft chalk-like 
touch of the worker on stone amalgamating far better with 
the colouring than the sharper and more determined lines of 
stroke-engraving can well do. But, viewing it on its own 
merits as a branch of the fine arts, we repeat, we thought 
meanly of the invention, and deemed it but a pitiful and 
sorry substitute for copperplate etching, which thus seemed 
threatened to be almost driven out of the field by its more 
modern rival. Such was our opinion of stone-engravings till 
of late ; an opinion which, after inspecting Mr. Strutt’s per- 
* The plates in Swainson’s Zoological Illustrations are, we believe, in 
most instances lithographic ; and in our judgment they are scarcely to be 
equalled, certainly not excelled, by those of any other publication. Some 
of the shells more especially we think the most beautiful things of the kind 
we have ever seen. We could wish, however, for his own sake, that Mr. 
Swainson would not levy so exorbitant a tax on his subscribers, as to 
charge them half a crown for about eight pages of titlepage, preface, 
indices, &c. 
