ture, but his best claim to renown is founded on his etchings of the magnificent ruins of ancient Rome.

His artistic production was enormous, probably unprecedented. There exist from his hand more than two thousand large, carefully executed plates. Many of these, however, cannot be called available pictures, being no more than archæological studies of detached details.

Piranesi's industry and facility were wonderful. He never boggled over the "first state" or the "second state" of his plate, and in my long researches in his work I have never seen more than one slight sketch drawn by him of a subject. which he afterward etched, and I have never seen a single trial proof of an unfinished plate. These elaborate etchings, the product of his brain and hand, seem to have sprung into existence full grown and fully armed.

His method of corroding, or "biting," his etched plates was unknown to others in his day. Other etchers plunged their plates into diluted aqua fortis, so that the acid would corrode the lines which had been drawn on the copper plate by the artist. So able a technician as Mr. Joseph Pennell declares, however, that Piranesi never achieved his rich black tones by that method, but with a stout feather must have painted his etched picture on the copper plate with the acid, thus achieving his wonderful gradations of tone.

Piranesi was endowed, or cursed, with what Thackeray calls "a fine, furious temper." Like his great predecessors, Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini, he quarreled with the pope.

However, he neglected one precaution which should be taken by every etcher who values his own reputation: he never destroyed any of his plates when they began to deteriorate through the wear and tear of the printing-press. The sad result is that prints from the worn-out and "doctored" plates can still be bought in Rome at the price of one dollar each; but so deplorable is their condition from over-use and abuse, that these prints are not really worth the dollar which is asked for them. Fine, unworn impressions of the works of the old engravers are essential to any collector who wishes examples of what the engraver had intended his proofs to be. This requirement, however, is much less impor

tant to-day, since an American named Perkins invented a process whereby an etched or engraved copper plate could have a very thin coating of steel superadded to it by a chemical process. This steel facing yields. very many more fine proofs than the bare copper could have yielded, and when the facing is at last worn out, all that remains of it can be removed by another chemical operation, and another thin coating of steel applied to the copper. So perfect is the working of the process in preserving unworn an etched copper plate, that I have in my possession the ninety thousandth proof of a plate, and it is a good one. It was given to me by the etcher Henri Guérard of Paris, and it represents the portrait of the prolific author who wrote the daily "penny dreadful" for the "Petit Journal," a paper which claims to have much the largest circulation in the world. This portrait was used by the publishers as a premium to new subscrib

ers.

Four centuries ago, in the time of Albrecht Dürer, the original engraver cut into the copper plate the lines which made his picture by means of an implement called a burin, or graver. Every line had to be cut separately, and famous line-engravings exist which exacted from the engraver from six to nine years of close work on a single plate. Yet such long and hard labor was necessary at that epoch, because line-engraving was then the only method of reproducing in black-and-white the essential design of some great picture painted in colors. The great English mezzotint engraver Samuel Cousins used to call this tedious work "solitary confinement with hard labor." The invention of the etching process is ascribed to Albrecht Dürer, who was born in the year 1471, and who was himself perhaps the supreme line-engraver. In the etching process there is no cutting of the lines into the copper plate line by line. The etcher covers his plate with a coating of varnish which is impervious to acid; he then draws the lines and dots of his composition into the prepared plate, each line cuts through the coating, or "ground," laying the copper bare. He then applies diluted aqua fortis to his plate, and this mordant acid corrodes, or "bites," the lines thus laid bare, while the coating protects all the rest.

After this first biting, if the plate were

printed from, every line would then be of equal strength; but by a refinement of the etching process a "stopping-out" varnish is used. At this stage the artist makes use of this varnish, closing all the more distant lines of the composition so that in the second biting the acid has no effect on the lines so stopped-out, while it goes on making deeper corrosion into the other lines that are unprotected by the varnish. Successive stoppings-out and bitings yield at last just the effect which the artist desires, and all this operation is still far more expeditious than the tedious method of the line-engraver.

What is called a "steel engraving" is nearly always an engraving on copper, which is a much easier metal for the artist to work on. Indeed, the only genuine steel engravings I know of are the banknotes issued by the Treasury at Washington.

In one respect etching is the most purely intellectual of all art processes. The painter, the sculptor, the illustrator, and the architect can see the effect which they are producing as they proceed with their work; but the etcher cannot see his future picture except in his "mind's eye." His method might be compared to that of the marksman who should point his rifle over his shoulder and fire it off backward; or like the feat of Blind Tom, the negro pianist, who in other respects was an idiot, but who could turn his back to the piano and play difficult compositions finely, his left hand playing the treble notes and his right hand the bass.

With regard to the magnificent ruins of ancient Rome, it may be mentioned that one precaution which their builders took to make them almost immortal was the cause of their disintegration and destruction. In building a temple, the builders used to strap each great stone to its fellow by means of a thick band of copper, but in later ages the ignorant inhabitants found it profitable to tear down these precious buildings so as to possess themselves of these bands.

Another and more inexcusable cause of the destruction of these precious monuments of antiquity was the using of them for quarries to supply stone for new buildings.

One of the buildings constructed of this pillaged material is the great Barberini

LXXXII-17

Palace. Of it an English writer has said that what the Goth and Vandal barbarians had spared, the Barberini destroyed. Even the magnificent Colosseum was used as a quarry, so that little is now left of it except part of the outer shell.

When we remember that most of the buildings etched by Piranesi were erected about two thousand years ago, this ignorant destruction of them is a source of keen regret. Indeed, the only great Roman building of that epoch which is still in use as a building, and not conserved as a melancholy ruin, is the Pantheon.

Among the writers who have celebrated the prints of Piranesi, two may be cited. In the early Victorian era Thomas De Quincey, in his famous book, "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," says:

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams (Le Carceri), and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld; and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams.

were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. From a great modern poet I cite part of a passage which describes, as an appearance actually beheld in the clouds, what in many of its circumstances I saw frequently in sleep:

The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city-boldly say
A wilderness of building, sinking far
And self-withdrawn into a boundless depth,
Far sinking into splendour-without end!
Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold,
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright,
In avenues disposed; there, towers begirt
With battlements that on their restless
fronts

Bore stars-illumination of all gems!
By earthly nature had the effect been
wrought

Upon the dark materials of the storm
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves
And mountain-steeps and summits,

whereunto

The vapors had receded, taking there Their station under a cerulean sky.

The sublime circumstance-"battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars,"might have been copied from my architectural dreams, for it often occurred.

De Quincey does not mention the name of the "great modern poet" who wrote this fine piece of blank verse, but it is to be found in Wordsworth's "Excursion."

Besides the ruins in Rome and in the Roman suburb of Tivoli, some of Piranesi's finest plates are the etchings of the great temples at Pæstum, which was originally a Greek colony, and came under Roman domination. These temples, built about 600 years before the Christian era, are in the stern and noble Doric style, which antedated both the Ionic and the Corinthian orders of architecture. Although the temple of Neptune has taken on a rich yellow color, Piranesi, while otherwise giving a faithful presentation of the great building, for pictorial purposes has imparted to it a rich blackness in the shaded parts which the building does not

possess.

The eminent architect and critic, the late Russell Sturgis of New York, in writing of Piranesi's etchings of the Pæstum temples, says: "The truth is that time has little to do with the destruction of a solid building. It is not time, but the wilful injury done by man, superadded, in some cases, by shock of earthquake, which has ruined the great buildings of the past."

If what is known as the Grand Style was exemplified by Michelangelo in sculpture and painting, by John Milton in poetry, and by Handel in music, it was surely possessed in etching by Piranesi.