ENGLISH LITERATURE. almost without a literature, only undergoing such changes as time inevitably effects upon a nascent language. Thus the Anglo-Saxon merged into the Semi-Saxon, which grew and flourished, although it contains very little literature of much importance, except the Brut of Layamon, the English Ennius.' The 14th and 15th centuries (the period of the Early English) are of great importance, both in the progress of English history and of English literature; for although the age of Edward II. was inglorious in both, yet in the next reign the victories of Crecy and Poitiers heralded as with trumpet-blast the age of thought and of poetry, represented by Wickliffe and Chaucer, both of them brave-hearted genuine Englishmen. The translation (the first ever executed) of the Bible into English, which was completed by Wickliffe about 1380, is a work of great value, not only as a monument in the religious history of our nation, but in a philological point of view, being, as it is, all but first among the prose-writings in our old tongue.' The principal book which precedes it, and the very oldest written in Early English, is Sir John Mandeville's account of his eastern travels (1356). Somewhat later (between 1390 and 1400), Geoffrey Chaucer, the genuine father of English poetry, published his Canterbury Tales. A shrewd and sagacious observer, he has left behind him in these Tales a series of sportive and pathetic narratives, told with such a wonderful power of tenderness and humour, in such a simple, healthy style (although his English is largely modified by French innovations), that they have been the wonder and delight of all succeeding times. Laurence Minot, Richard Rolle, Langland or Longlande, author of Piers Plowman, and Gower, fitly close round Chaucer as contemporaries who wrote more or less vigorous verse. About the same period flourished in Scotland John Barbour, whose epic narrative, The Bruce, was written about 1376. The language of this poem resembles that contemporaneously employed in the south. In the following c. (the 15th), and in the early part of the 16th, occur in England the names of John Lydgate (1430), whose London Lyckpenny is still agreeable reading; Alexander Barclay, whose Ship of Fools was printed in 1509; John Skelton, author of the scurrilous satire of Colin Clout (died 1529); Howard, Earl of Surrey (beheaded 1546 1547); and Sir Thomas Wyatt (died 1541). The prose writers of this period are Sir John Fortescue, chiefjustice of the King's Bench under Henry VI., who flourished 1430-1470, and who wrote, among other things, a tract on the Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, as it more particularly regards the English Constitution; William Caxton, who introduced printing into Britain in 1474-the first book ever printed in this country being the Game of Chess; Fabian, author of the Concordance of Stories, died 1512; Hall, an English lawyer (died 1547), who wrote a chronicle of the Wars of the Roses; and Tyndale, burned (1536) for heresy. In Scotland, during the same period, we encounter in poetry the names of James I., king of Scotland (murdered 1437), author of the King's Quhair, &c.; Andrew Wyntoun, prior of Lochleven, whose Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland was completed about 1420; Blind Harry, author of The Adventures of William Wallace, a work written about 1460, and long exceedingly popular with the Scottish peasantry; Robert Henryson (died 1508), author of The Testament of Cresseid, &c.; William Dunbar (died about 1520), whose Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins shews him to have possessed great boldness and vigour in his delineations of character; and Gavin Douglas (died 1522), whose best work is a translation of Virgil's Eneid into Scottish verse. 3. The Period extending from the English Refor mation to the Present Day.-Among the brilliant works of the Elizabethan age, there is probably none of which we may not detect germs in some of the efforts which were made in the century that preceded. In theology, the names of Latimer (burned 1555), of Cranmer (burned 1556), and of Ridley (burned 1555), shine forth conspicuously; and it is sufficient to mention Sir Thomas More (beheaded 1535), author of Utopia, a curious philosophical work, and Roger Ascham (died 1568), as excellent miscellaneous writers of that time. As we have already taken up the English drama under the article DRAMA, we need only mention here Sackville (died 1608), author of Mirrour for Magistrates, &c.; Brooke (drowned 1563), author of the Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet; and the Scotchmen, Sir David Lyndsay, Lyon King-at-arms (died about 1557), Boece, Major, Melville, and, above all, George Buchanan (died 1582), who is universally admitted to have been one of the finest classical scholars that ever appeared in Christendom. The founding of the Scottish universities, and the dissemination, mainly through the influence of the great reformer John Knox, of grammar and parish schools throughout the country, bade fair to give to Scotland an important place in the literature of Great Britain; a result which unforeseen ecclesiastico-political troubles long frustrated. The era on which we are next to look, the Elizabethan, is the most brilliant in the literary history of England. We may quote here the words of Lord Jeffrey: In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo X., or of Louis XIV., can come at all into comparison. For in that short period we shall find the names of almost all the great men that this nation has ever produced; the names of Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sidney; of Raleigh, and Hooker, and Taylor; of Napier, and Milton, and Cudworth, and Hobbes; and many others-men, all of them not merely of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly creative; not men who perfected art by the delicacy of their taste, or digested knowledge by the justness of their reasonings; but men who made vast and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and reason must hereafter be employed, and who enlarged to an incredible and unparalleled extent both the stores and the resources of the human faculties.' Even the minor dramatists of the time, such as Marlowe and Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson and Drummond, are all nearly the equala of any succeeding poets that have appeared. the latter half of this period a new class of poetic writers started up, who were lyrical rather than dramatic, and whose occasional verses, sometimes descriptive, sometimes amatory, and sometimes religious, are characterised by a bright and delicate fancy, as if morning sunbeams glittered on their pages. These are George Wither, William Browne, Frances Quarles, and George Herbert, the sweet psalmist of the 17th century' (as Emerson calls him). The last forty years of the 17th c. are gener ally known as the age of the Restoration and the Revolution. During this period, the literature of the stage was disgraced by its indecency. Charles II. and his court had brought back with them from France a love of polite profligacy, which found its most fitting expression in the comedy of intrigue. Four names stand out conspicuous as sinners above all men in that generation'Wycherly, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. Yet theology could boast of such names as Baxter, In ENGRAILED-ENGRAVING. Owen, Calamy, Collier, Leighton, South, Tillotson, Tennyson, the Brownings, Matthew and Edwi and Barrow. This was also the epoch when the great Milton, driven into the shades of obscurity by political adversities, fulfilled the uttered hope of his youth, and wrote something which posterity will not willingly let die.' About this time, too, Walton angled, and Butler burlesqued dissent; Marvell turned his keen irony against the High Church; Locke and Newton speculated and discovered; and John Dryden, the literary chief of the time, 'found the English language (according to Dr Johnson) of brick and left it of marble.' Arnold, Dobell, and Smith, as poets; and in the New World beyond the Atlantic, Washington Irving, Poe, Longfellow, Cooper, Prescott, Emerson, Bancroft, and Hawthorne, with many more, rise before the mind when one tries to seize upon the great living authors of this age or those recently dead. A considerable portion of the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries is devoted to science, which can shew a crowd of illustrious names too numerous to mention. Besides, in scientific works, the matter is of so much greater importance than the form, and so little attention is paid in general to the latter by scientific writers, that it is not customary to include them in a survey of literature proper. NN Engrailed. Invected. supposed to have been made in it by hail. Engrailed is the opposite of invected. The literary history of the 18th c., and of the reign of Queen Anne, has been variously estimated. If it was overvalued by those who lived in it, and in the age that succeeded, it has assuredly been undervalued in our own day. It was long glorified as ENGRAILED, in Heraldry, a line composed the Augustan age of English literature; but among ourselves it has been set aside as a sceptical, utili- of a series of little half-moons, or semicircles, tarian age, when poetry could find no higher field than didactic discussion, and prose found nothing to amuse but comic and domestic narrative, or bitter and stinging satire. The truth, as usual, lies in the middle. This age was far from being superior to every era that had gone before it, and it was not quite so low as some of its hostile critics have represented. One thing, however, is beyond dispute, viz., that the form, both in poetry and in prose, had come to be much more regarded than the matter. Addison, Swift, and Johnson, may be taken as types of the prose writers of this century. The first for ease and grace is unmatched in any age; the second stands equally high for rough and pointed vigour; and the third is famous for his ponderous, finely balanced sentences, the dignity of which not unfrequently surpassed the sense. The poetry of the time is represented by Pope, and it has been gravely asked whether he was a poet at all. He certainly versified with brilliant elegance, and the terror which his polished epigrams excited in the breasts of his enemies, shewed him to possess a force of genius which at least demands our admiration. Young and Akenside were perhaps animated by a higher poetic sense, but they accomplished much less; and the same may also be said of Thomson, Gray, Collins, Beattie, and Cowper. Incomparably the greatest poet, however, of the 18th c. was Robert Burns. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie are its novelists; Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, its historians; Butler, Berkeley, Clarke, Shaftesbury, Hume, Paley, and Adam Smith its philosophers. The 19th c., though full of interest for us, is, from the novelty and the variety of the intellectual character employed in it, one of the most difficult to analyse of the whole range of English literature. It has been a time of extraordinary activity, books have been multiplied to an unprecedented degree, and readers have increased in an equal proportion. It cannot be doubted, however, that the first quarter of this century is greater in literature than any subsequent portion of it. It is greater, besides, in poetry than in prose. The early names of Coleridge and Wordsworth, of Scott and Byron, of Shelley and Keats, of Campbell and Southey, are higher than any now prominent except that of Tennyson. This is the age, besides, of novels and romances, of reviews and periodicals. Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, Hazlitt and John Foster, De Quincey and Carlyle, are the great names in review-literature; Hall Chalmers, and Irving in pulpit oratory; Stewart, Mackintosh, Bentham, Brown, Hamilton, and Mill in philosophy; Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Miss Bronte, and Miss Evans, as novelists; Hallam, Macaulay, Thirlwall, Grote, Milman, and Carlyle, as historians; Ruskin, ... a writer on art; ENGRAVING, in its widest sense, is the art of incising designs, writing, &c., on any hard substance, such as stone, metal, or wood. Many branches of the art are of great antiquity; such as gem-engraving, cameo-cutting, and die-sinking. The more important of these ornamental and useful kinds of engraving are described under their proper heads. But in a narrower sense, engraving is the special designation of the art of cutting or indenting the surface of metal plates or of blocks of wood with designs, for the purpose of taking off impressions or prints of the designs on paper. This department of the art arose as late as the 15th c., the earliest wood-engraving with a date being 1423, and the earliest dated engraving from a metal plate being 1461. Wood-engraving differs from engraving on metal in this, that on a metal plate the traces or marks which are to appear on the paper are cut or sunk into the plate, and when printed from are filled with ink, while the rest of the surface is kept clean; whereas in wood-engraving they are left prominent or in relief, and the blank parts of the design are cut away. Hence a wood-cut acts as a type, and is inked and printed from in the usual way. See PRINTING. This makes wood-engraving peculiarly suitable for the illustration of books; as the blocks can be printed from along with the letterpress; while the impressions from a metal plate must be taken by themselves, and by a slow process. The further treatment of the important art of WoodENGRAVING is reserved for a separate article; our attention at present being confined to engraving on metal. It is beyond our scope to enter into the practical details of the various processes; we can only aim at enabling a reader altogether ignorant of them to conceive how the effects may be produced, and to understand the terms currently used in speaking of this kind of art. The metals most commonly used for engraving are copper and steel, the former having the advan tage of being more easily worked, the latter of greater durability. The processes of working are ENGRAVING. essentially the same in both. The several manners or styles of engraving are distinguished as Lineengraving, Mezzotinto, Stippling, and Aquatinta. I. Line-engraving in which, as the name implies, the effect is produced by a combination of lines is executed either by direct incision with the graver or the dry-point, or by a combination of incision with etching a chemical process to be immediately described. The graver or burin is usually in the form of a quadrangular prism, fitted into a short handle. In making the incision, the graver is pushed forward in the direction of the line required, being held by the handle, at an angle very slightly inclined to the plane of the copper. A scraper is required to scrape off the barb or burr which is formed by the action of the graver and dry-point. The rubber is a roll of cloth dipped in oil, and is used to make the surface smooth. A burnisher is required to polish the plate, and erase any scratches which it may accidentally receive, and also to make lighter any part of the work which may have been made too dark. The dry-point is like a sewingneedle fixed into a handle, and is used to cut or scratch the finer lines. The graver cuts the copper clean out, the dry-point throws it up on each side; and in some cases this is not scraped off, but made use of till it is worn off, as it gives richness to the line. In etching, the first step is to cover the plate with a composition of wax, asphaltum, gum mastic, resin, &c., dissolved by heat; an outline of the design, made on paper in pencil or red chalk, is then 'transferred' to the surface of this composition, by being passed through a press. The subject is then drawn on the ground with the etching-point, which cuts through it, and exposes the copper. Etching-points or needles resemble large sewing-needles shortened, and fixed into handles four or five inches long; some are made oval, to produce broader lines. A rim of wax being put round the plate, acid is poured on, and corrodes the copper not protected by the ground. If the acid is found not to have acted sufficiently, it may be applied again to the whole design, or only to portions of it, by stopping up, with a mixture of lampblack and Venice turpentine applied with a camel-hair pencil, what has been sufficiently bitten in. When a series of parallel lines are wanted, as in backgrounds, &c., an ingenious machine called a ruler is employed, the accuracy of whose operation is exceedingly perfect. This is made to act on etching-ground by a point or diamond connected with the apparatus, and the tracings are bit in with aquafortis in the ordinary way.. 2. The process of mezzotinto is by no means so dificult as line-engraving. The plate is prepared by being indented or hacked all over by an instrument with a serrated edge, called a cradle, which is rocked to and fro upon it in all directions. The barb or nap thus produced retains the printer's ink, and if printed, a uniform dark surface would be the result. On this plate, after a tracing has been transferred, the engraver goes to work with tools called scrapers and burnishers-those parts of the ground most smoothed being the highest lights, and the ground the least operated on producing the deepest shadows. As the work proceeds, it may be blackened with ink, applied with a printer's ball or otherwise, in order to ascertain the effect. The design is sometimes etched on the plate by the ordinary process, before the mezzotinto ground is laid. books. In this process, which is a very complex kind of etching, the ground, which is composed of pulverised rosin and spirits of wine, assumes when dry a granulated form; and the aquafortis acting on the metal between the particles, reduces the surface to a state that an impression from it resembles a tint or wash of colour on paper. David Allan engraved his celebrated illustrations of the Gentle Shepherd in this manner. It has now gone almost entirely out of use, having, like engraving in imitations of drawings in chalk or pencil, been in a great degree superseded by lithography. 4. In engraving in Stipple, which was much in vogue in the end of the last century, the drawing and effect are produced by small dots, in place of lines. Ryland, Bartolozzi, and Sherwin, excelled in this style. It is well suited for portraits; several of Raeburn's have been capitally engraved in stipple by Walker. It involves much more labour than mezzotinto, and is now little practised. Plate-printing-Copper-plates, engraved in any of the above styles, are ready for press as soon as they are finished by the engraver. The method of printing from them is very simple. Their engraved surface is daubed over with a thick oleaginous ink, so that the lines are effectually filled. As this dirties the whole face of the plate, it is necessary to clean it, which is done by the workman wiping it first with a piece of cloth, and then with the palms of his hands, rubbed on fine whiting. It may be calculated that a hundred times more ink is thus removed than actually remains in the indentations; how. ever, such is necessary. The plate being thoroughly cleaned, it is laid on a press (see fig.), with a piece of damped paper over it; and being wound beneath a roller covered with blanket-stuff, it is forced to yield an impression on the paper. The plate requires to be kept at a moderate warmth during the operation. The frequent rubbing of the plate with the hand to clean it, as may be supposed, tends greatly to wear it down; and such is the wear chiefly from this cause, that few copper-plates will yield more than a few thousands of impressions in good order. The earliest, called proofs, are always the best and most highly prized. In consequence of this defect in copper, the practice of engraving steel-plates, for all subjects requiring a great many impressions, has now become very common. This process was introduced by the late Mr Perkins of London, who originally softened the plates, engraved them, and then rehardened thema practice now abandoned, as ordinary steel-plates can be worked upon by the burin, dry-point, scraper, and burnisher with perfect facility. Etching on 3. Aquatint Engraving. By this method, the effect steel-plates is executed much in the same way as in of drawings in Indian ink is produced; and at one the process on copper. An engraving on a steeltime it was greatly made use of in rendering the plate may be transferred in relief to a softened steel drawings of Paul Sandby and our early water-cylinder by pressure; and this cylinder, after being colour painters, and particularly prints for drawing- | hardened, may again transfer the design by rolling ENGRAVING. it upon a fresh steel-plate; and thus the design may be multiplied at pleasure. Martin Rota, and others, ranging from the middle to the end of the 16th century. Agost. Caracci the celebrated painter, executed many spirited engravings. Saenredam, De Bruyn, Galle, Kellerthaller, Alberti, De Goudt, C. de Pass, Sadeler, are names of well-known engravers that enter on the 17th century. Henry Goltzius is noted for the number and variety of his works, and his imitations of the styles of the older masters. In the plates of engravers towards the middle of the 17th, and beginning of the 18th c., a large proportion of the work consists of etching, the graver being chiefly used for deepening and clearing up the etching. This arose from the manner of working being well adapted for rendering the style of the painters of that period, whose works were distinguished for freedom of execution or touch, and clearness and transparency. The most noted engravers of this period were the Vischers, who flourished between 1610 and 1650, and engraved many of Berghem's pictures; Bolswert, 1620; Lucas Vosterman the Elder, 1630; Suyderhoef, about 1640. These engravers rendered many of the works of Rubens in a very spirited manner. Coryn Boelwhose engravings from Teniers are in some respects superior even to Le Bas-Troyen, and Van Kessel, are worthy contemporaries. History of Engraving.-This most important invention, by which the productions of art are diffused without limit, is said to have been accidental, and is claimed for Tommaso Finiguerra, who first took impressions on paper about the year 1440. His employment was executing ornamental engraving, chiefly on articles used in religious services, such as small portable shrines, or altar-pieces. These were generally made of silver, and the designs engraved on them were filled up with a black composition, that hardened in a short time. This composition was called in Italian miello (from Lat. nigellus, dim. of niger, black), and the workers in it niellatori. It was the practice of Finiguerra, in the course of executing his work, to prove it by rubbing lampblack and oil into, and pressing paper over it; he thus obtained an impression of his work up to a particular stage, and was enabled safely to carry it on till it was completed. Finiguerra's title to the invention has been disputed; and in a recent work by J. D. Passavant, Le Peintre-Graveur (Leip. 1860), a strong case seems to be made out for its German origin. Be that as it may, the principal early Italian engravers who followed Finiguerra, were Bacio Baldini (born about 1436, died 1515); Sandro Botticelli (born 1437, died 1515) - he embellished an edition of Dante's Inferno, brought out in 1481; Antonio Pollajuoli (born 1426, died 1498, at Florence); Andrea Mantegna (born at Padua 1431, died at Mantua 1505); and Marc Antonio Raymondi (born at Bologna 1487 or 1488, died 1539), who executed his chief works at Rome. The most celebrated early German engravers were Martin Schoengauer (born at Colmar about 1455, died 1499); Israel van Mecheln, or Meckenen (born at Meckenen on the Meuse about 1450, and died 1523); Michel Wohlgemuth, who died in 1519; Albert Dürer (born at Nürnberg in 1471, died in | 1528); and Lucas van Leyden (born at Leyden 1494, died 1533). The engravings of all these artists are very valuable, not only from their scarceness, and as illustrating the early history and progress of the art, but as exemplifying many high qualities that have never been surpassed in later times. The most of them were painters, and engraved their own works, except Marc Antonio, who engraved chiefly those of Raphael, by whom he was employed, and who occasionally overlooked and directed him. All those engravers, and their immediate followers, executed their works with the graver; but soon after, engravings came to be generally executed by two processes-etching, and cutting with the graver or the dry-point. The works of these early masters are often remarkable for character and expression, as those, for instance, by Mantegna; and for the correctness and high style of the drawing, for which qualities Marc Antonio has never been surpassed; also for finish of the most careful and elaborate kind, which has been carried further by Albert Dürer and Lucas van Leyden than by any other engravers. The styles of these early engravers were cultivated by numerous successors, several of whom followed their masters as closely as they could, while others diverged into something like originality: the chief names are Agostino Veneziano, about 1620; Nicolas Belin da Modena, and Giov. Ghisi, 1630; Luc. Damesz, who died in 1533; Giov. Giac. Caraglio, and It was about the middle and latter portion of Marco da Ravenna, about 1640; Giul. Bonasone, last century that engraving reached its highest Born at Bologna in 1498, died in Rome in 1564; point in England. The works of William Hogarth Eneus Vicus, George Vens, Henrid Aldegraf, and (b. London 1698, d. 1764) are of world-wide celeJean Sebast. Boehm, about 1550; Adrian, Charles, brity, but that is owing mainly to the excellence William, and John Collert, Adam and George and dramatic interest of the pictures from which Chisi, Sutermann, Virgilius Solis, Cornelius Cort, the engravings are made, though, no doubt, bia In the age of Louis XIV., a race of engravers of portraits arose, who carried execution with the graver almost to perfection. The works of the artists they engraved from were florid in style, with a great display of drapery and lace, and accessories in the backgrounds elaborately executed. Among these engravers the following rank highest: Gerard Edelinck (b. Antwerp 1627, d. Paris 1707)he was one of the best engravers of the period, and specially patronised by Louis XIV.; Masson (b. 1636, d. 1700); Larmessin (b. 1640, d. 1684); Drevet the Elder (b. 1664, d. 1739); Drevet the Younger (b. 1697); Gerard Andran (b. 1640, d. 1703). There was a large family of Andrans engravers, but Gerard was the most celebrated, indeed he was one of the best of the French engravers. Among engravers of talent in England may be mentioned Robert Walker (b. 1572); William Faithorne (b. London between 1620 and 1630, d. 1694) executed many excellent engravings of portraits; George Vertue (b. London 1684, d. 1756), a good engraver, and a man of general information and taste in matters of art; John Smith (b. London 1654, d. 1722) executed in mezzotinto a vast number of interesting portraits. In the 18th c., there were numerous excellent engravers, by whose works the taste for the pictures of the Dutch school of the 17th c. has been widely extended. Two of the most distinguished of these were John Philip le Bas (b. Paris 1708, d. 1782) and John George Wille (b. Königsberg 1717, d. 1808). Their styles are totally dissimilar. Le Bas's plates are chiefly etched, and remarkable for spirit and sharpness of touch and transparency; accordingly, mostly all his works are after painters who excelled in these qualities, particularly Teniers. Wille's engravings, again, are of the most careful and elaborate description, and his best prints are after Gerard Dow, Terburg, Mieris, and Metzumasters distinguished for the high finish of their pictures. He worked with the graver; and his plates are distinguished by the precision and clearness with which the lines are cut. ENGRAVING. artists of the day. Several, however, of Landseer's earlier works have been engraved in the line manner, particularly his pictures of Drovers leaving the Grampians,' and 'The Watering-place,' by Watt, which are capital examples of line-engraving. There is no good modern school of landscape-engrav ing on the continent; the influence of Woolet was entirely confined to this country, where landscapeengraving, particularly in illustrated works after Turner, has attained great excellence. Studiorum, and the landscapes after Constable, are admirable examples of its capabilities in this way; the effect in Turner's plates, however, is heightened by etching. prints are engraved in a firm clear style, similar to that practised by the French engravers of the time, several of whom were employed by him. It was Sir Robert Strange (b. Orkney 1721, d. London 1792), an engraver of figures, and William Woolet (b. Maidstone 1735, d. London 1785), a landscape-engraver, who imparted to English engraving those qualities and characteristics that enable us to claim a style of engraving that is national, differing from other styles, and that has arisen and been best carried out in this country. In Towards the end of last century, mezzotintodrawing and form, Strange was rather defective; engraving was practised in England with great but he excelled in what engravers call colour, or the success; arising from its being peculiarly adapted art of producing, by means of variety of line, a to render effectively the works of Sir Joshua Reytexture or quality that compensates for the want of nolds. M'Ardell, Earlom, Watson, Smith, Valentine colour, by giving to the engraving something of the Green, and Ward were among the best engravers of richness produced by colour in a picture. His imita- his works. The invention of this process is genertion of the softness and semi-transparency of flesh ally given to Prince Rupert, others ascribe it to was particularly successful, and superior to that of Dr Wren, 1662, and state that Prince Rupert merely the French engravers, whose works, though in most improved on the invention. It has been practised respects admirable, failed in that respect, and had, very generally from the time of its invention, but in the more delicate parts, a hard or metallic look. attained its highest position in Sir Joshua's time; Woolet treated landscape-engraving in a manner and it is very successfully carried out now, in an totally new, imparting to it more firmness and altered manner, additional force being aimed at, by decision, by making great use of the graver. His means of stippling and etching. It is well calcu works have more finish and force than former land-lated for producing broad effects: Turner's Liber scape-engravers, but they are in some degree liable to the objection of hardness, in the treatment of foliage in particular. The works of these two engravers have had a marked influence on art, not only in this country, but abroad. The merit of Strange's style was acknowledged on the continent; he was elected a member of the Academies of Florence, Bologna, Parma, and Rome. At the end of last century, art had fallen very low on the continent, but a regeneration was beginning; and in Italy, engravers were then arising, such as Volpato and Cunego, who studied and imitated the softness and, technically speaking, fleshiness of texture that distinguished the works of the British engraver; those, again, were followed by Raphael Morghen, Longhi, Mercurii, and others, in Italy; by Boucher Desnoyers, Forster, &c., in France; and by Müller, Keller, Gruner, and numerous other engravers in Germany. By them, engraving has been carried to the highest pitch. Amongst their works, the following are chefs-d'œuvres: The Last Supper,' after Da Vinci, by R. Morghen; the Spozalizia,' after Raphael, by Longhi; La Belle Jardinière,' and other works, after Raphael, by Boucher Desnoyers, who has engraved the works of Raphael perhaps on English Works on Engraving-Sculpture, or the the whole better than any other engraver; The History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving Madonna de San Sisto,' by Müller, and The Dispute on Copper, by John Evelyn (Lond. 12mo, 1663; on the Sacrament,' after Raphael, of Keller. No Svo, 1755); The Art of Engraving and Etching, with engravings executed in this country come up to the Way of Printing Copper-plates, by M. Faithorne the works of these last-named masters, who have (Lond. 1702); Sculptura Historico-technico, or the engraved works of a higher class than the majority History and Art of Engraving, extracted from Balof those done by Strange, while the drawing and dinucci Florent, Le Compt, Faithorne, the Abecadario general treatment of their works are in a purer and Pittorico, and other authors (Lond. 4to, 1747, 1766, inore correct style. However, the engravings of and 1770); An Essay upon Prints, by Gilpin (Lond. Burnet, Raimbach, Stewart, and others after Wilkie 8vo, 1767, 1768, and 1781); Strutt's Biographical and contemporary British painters, deservedly hold Dictionary of Engravers (2 vols., 4to, Lond. 1785); the highest place among works of the class to Landseer's Lectures on Engraving (Svo, Lond. 1806); which they belong, and betoken clearly the great An Inquiry into the Origin and Early History of influence which Strange exercised on their style. Engraving upon Copper and on Wood, by William At present, few figure-subjects are executed in Young Ottley (4to, Lond. 1816). the line-manner, and that art has certainly fallen in this country. This may be accounted for, perhaps, by the great use made of mechanical appliances, in portions of the work, to save time, and by the preference shewn for mezzotintoengraving as practised at present, that is, with a mixture of lining or stippling. The greater number of Landseer's works have been engraved in that way, and it is now adopted for rendering the works of John Phillip and Millais, and the leading Etching has been already described as a part of the process of engraving; but as practised by painters, it is classed as a distinct art. The plate is prepared with a ground, and corroded in the same way; but the treatment is more free. Not being tied to the task of literally copying or translating the idea of another, like the engraver, the painter has scope to impart a spirit to his work peculiarly suggestive of what he intends to embody; his idea is represented directly, and not at second-hand, as it were. The etchings of Rembrandt, Paul Potter, Karl du Jardin, Adrian Vandevelde, Teniers, Ostade, Berghem, Backhuysen, Van Dyck, Claude, Salvator Rosa, Canaletti, and other painters, are very highly valued, as conveying more completely the feeling of the painter than the best engravings. Etching was more practised by the old than by modern painters; yet Wilkie, Landseer, and other modern artists, have etched various plates, remarkable for character and spirit. Of late years, many inventions have been introduced, having for their object to supersede the slow and laborious manual operations of engraving by means of machinery and other appliances. It is, however, to business and ornamental purposes that they are applicable, and not to the production of artistic engravings of the kind treated of in this article. The subject will be noticed under MACHINE ENGRAVING, MEDALS, GLASS, &c. With regard to the reproduction of plates, and other aj pl. tions of |