consequently in obtaining unwarrantable prices, for stipple engraving, which at its best has limitations hardly recognised by its chief exponents.
Bartolozzi used it with masterly skill and has left a name with regard to prices that leaves a feeling of awe in the fashionable auction-room. At one time Bartolozzi was unprocurable by a poor man. It was thought to be the thing to hang his prints with Chippendale and with Sheraton furniture. The word went round and half the fashionable world were striving to be up to date in taste. It is reducing print collecting to an absurdity when many prints after Morland and Wheatley and Westall have brought under the hammer a great deal more than the original drawings or paintings would sell for if offered to the same sapient crowd of amateurs. Nowadays many wiser collectors have "unloaded," and the engravings of Bartolozzi have in later days come down somewhat in price, but they have not yet touched bottom, and we do not advise any one to touch them. The Birth of Shakespeare after Angelica Kaufmann, printed in red, a feeble and displeasing allegory, brings the ridiculous price of £12 and this when an Ostade etching, or a fine Nanteuil line engraving may be procured for a sovereign, or dozens of fine French etchings at half a sovereign each, or scores of line engravings after Turner at a shilling or so apiece! It is a fact that through Bartolozzi's twelve hundred subjects there is much that is flimsy and much that is worthless, and there is the added drawback that his plates have been preserved and have been printed from long after his death, to the
