Kaufmann and others crept into practice. It must be admitted that considerable softness resulted from the use of these inks, but the work lost considerably in tone values, and degenerated into mere prettiness. To help one to realise how far this school had gone, let the reader imagine if he can how such printing would have treated some of the world's finest prints. Is it possible to imagine Albert Dürer's Prodigal Son or Rembrandt's Three Trees in red!
But the colour printer went farther than red and brown ink, he endeavoured to reproduce the colours of the original artist's work. With great skill he covered the work on the plate with various coloured inks and produced innumerable subjects from plates worked in stipple, from plates wrought in line, from etched plates, and from plates scraped in mezzotint. The progression of this idea has continued down to the present day. In aquatint, in lithography, and in wood engraving the love for colour seized alike printer and publisher. The frontispiece to this volume is in the latest three-colour process, a photographic method which has done so much to revolutionise modern illustration. Its subject is Simplicity, engraved by Bartolozzi after Sir Joshua Reynolds's picture of Miss Gwatkin. A proof of this, printed in brown, sells for twenty guineas, but an impression of this in colour is worth, or rather sells under the hammer for, £50. It is only fair to admit readily that a great many colour prints are very beautiful and that considerable ingenuity has been shown by the printer in his delicate and artistic printing of them, but there is no cogent reasoning that will uphold their in-
