I. TWO CLASSES OF ETCHING.

AS in France and America, so, very specially, in England, the productions of the etcher have to be divided broadly into two classes, one of which is the result mainly of a commercial demand, and the other, of an artistic impulse. The etcher whose employment of the etching-needle is confined wholly, or confined in the main, to the work of realizing and translating the conceptions of another, is, like the reproductive line-engraver, or the reproductive engraver in mezzotint, little more than the dexterous instrument which carries anothe message. So artistic is his process, when it is properly used, that it is preferable indeed that he be himself an artist as well as a craftsman—it is indeed essential that he shall have some measure of artistic feeling, as well as the flexibility of the executant. But our demands upon him stop, in any case, at a comparatively early point; and we find him more or less sharply cut off in our minds, and in our estimation, from the artist who, when he employs the etching-needle, is occupied with the spontaneous expression of his own thought and fancy—of the particular things of beauty and of interest which may strike him on his way through the world.