as surely as though the sitter had betrayed his personality, and the lines of his burin are as powerful as the strokes of the brush of Mr. Sargent. His gallery of seventeenth-century portraits conveys as much illumination as the pages of the writers of the secret Memoirs of the Court. But he is no satirist, the delicacy of his lines show a grace and elegance unequalled by any engraver either before or since. The particular freedom of touch with which he engraves the soft silky lines of the flowing hair of his subjects is particularly pleasing. The glowing texture of their satin doublets, or the pulsating life in their hands or in the flesh tints in the face is not black-and-white art, it is a mirror held to life itself. In his magnificent portraits of Turenne, in his later years, of Lamothe Le Vayer, and of Loret, this powerful realisation of character coupled with an unequalled grace and delicacy is especially marked. It is ridiculous that such a portrait as Marshal Turenne should be bought for two guineas, or Cardinal Mazarin for three guineas, or the Prince de Condé for £2, or Christina, Queen of Sweden, for a sovereign, or John Evelyn for 15s., and some of his lesser-known portraits for 10s. or even less, when English mezzotints, good, bad, and indifferent, bring absurdly large prices at Christie's and elsewhere. This fact shows indisputably that in art the English amateur is led by the nose by the fashionable dealer. Magnificent mezzotints are doubtless worth magnificent prices, but all mezzotints are not worth the prices they bring in the auction-room. It were better if collectors studied the art of engraving as a whole,
