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Watkiss Lloyd was there, and other friends came in the evening. I spent the day at home, writing, but I have an engagement for every night this week I am becoming a sort of professional diner-out. "I have been talking over the illustrations of the 'Painter's Camp' with George Leslie. He has promised to do twenty etchings of figure-subjects to illustrate it, and I shall do twenty landscapes.

Here insouciante girlhood was dead as Manetho's dynasties, and years seemed to have passed over this auburn head since he saw it last. Human faces are Nature's highest type of etchings, and mental anguish bites deeper than Dutch mordant; heart-ache is the keen needle that traces finest lines. "Yes, I know you only too well. You are Tiberius."

From the French windows I could see smooth lawns and bright flower-beds, while beyond appeared the dark green plantations surmounted with grey mountain heights. Photographic groups and etchings shared the task of decorating the walls with riding-gear and Indian knives. The writing-table was strewn with photograph-frames of all sorts and sizes.

Of the two landscapes, that with the ruined castle is the most impressive, but neither compares favorably with the dainty perfection of the landscape etchings.

Rembrandt and Duerer are the only men whose actual work of hand you can have to look at; you can have Rembrandt's etchings, or Duerer's engravings actually hung in your schools; and it is a main point for the student to see the real thing, and avoid judging of masters at second-hand.

It is essentially light and quiet and well regulated, sane and reasonable, never staggering or blinded by excess: it is full of intelligent discrimination, of intelligent leniency, of well-bred reserved sympathy; it is civilized as are the wide well-paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous black alleys of mediæval Paris; as are the well-lit, clean, spacious palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante compared with the squalid, unhealthy, uncomfortable mediæval castles of Dürer's etchings.

The Aengusmere Caravanserai is so unyieldingly cheerful and artistic that it makes the ordinary person long for a dingy old-fashioned room in which he can play solitaire and chew gum without being rebuked with exasperating patience by the wall stencils and clever etchings and polished brasses. It is adjectiferous. Istra had gone up to her room to sleep, bidding Mr.

We admire Meryon and Helleu's drypoints, Bracquemond, Jacquemart; Félix Buhot has a following; Lalanne and Daubigny too; but in comparison with the demand for Rembrandt, Whistler, Seymour Haden, or Zorn the Paris men are not in the lead. There is Rops, for example, whose etchings may be compared to Meryon's; yet who except a few amateurs seeks Rops?

Petersburg, or the 20 in the Louvre, or the 20 at Cassel, or the 17 at Berlin, or the 16 at Dresden, or the 12 in the National Gallery, or the etchings and drawings in the print room of the British Museum, or the frame of etchings at South Kensington, so accessible, I drop him.

Of these etchings I would mention a few; the reader may put these indications alongside of his remembrances of the Arena Chapel, or of Angelico's cupboard panels in the Academy at Florence: they show how intimately dramatic imagination depends in art upon mere technical means, how hopelessly limited to mere indication were the early artists, how forced along the path of dramatic realisation are the men of modern times.