struts s Syha Eritdnnica. WL^ 



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. 



