It is also to be observed, that Mr. Landseer speaks as if the term _colour_ was used by ignorant printsellers, and of course ignorant engravers, to signify _shade_ only. It is, however, used by them to signify that there is a considerable proportion of dark lines and hatchings in an engraving, although such lines and hatchings are not expressive of shade, but merely indicative of deep colours. Dark brown, red, and purple, for instance, even when receiving direct rays of light, would naturally contain much conventional “colour” in an engraving; and so would a bay horse, a coal barge, or the trunk of an old oak tree, when receiving the light in a similar manner; all would be represented as comparatively dark, when contrasted with lighter coloured objects,--for instance, with a blue sky, grass, or light green foliage,--although not in shade. An engraving that appears too light, compared with the painting from which it is copied, is said to want “colour,” and the copper-plate engraver remedies the defect by thickening the dark lines, or by adding cross lines and hatchings. As a copper-plate engraver can always obtain more “colour,” he generally keeps his work light in the first stage of a plate; on the contrary, a wood engraver keeps his first proof dark, as he cannot afterwards introduce more “colour,” or give to an object a greater depth of shade. A wood engraver can make his lines thinner if they be too thick, and thus cause his subject to appear lighter; but if he has made them too fine at first, and more colour be wanted, it is not in his power to remedy the defect. What Mr. Landseer’s ideas may be of the “means [which] the art of engraving possesses of rendering local colour in the abstract,” I cannot very well comprehend. I am aware of the lines used conventionally by engravers to indicate heraldic colours in coat-armour; but I can see no natural relation between perpendicular lines in an engraving and the red colour of a soldier’s coat. I believe that no person could tell the colour of the draperies in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper from an inspection of Raphael Morghen’s engraving of it. When Mr. Landseer says that he will use the term “colour” in its “ordinary acceptation,” he ought to have explained what the ordinary acceptation of the word meant when applied to impressions from copper-plates which consist of nothing but lines and interstices of black and white. [Illustration]