are, as I believe, of honest reputation and religious; one would, however, rather have one of the other kind who otherwise conducts herself in a pleasant manner, than a fretful, jealous, scolding wife--however devout she may be--with whom a man can have no peace either day or night. We must, however, leave the matter to the will of God, who will be gracious and merciful to Albert, for his life was that of a pious and righteous man. As he died like a good Christian, we may have little doubt of his salvation. God grant us grace, and that in his own good time we may happily follow Albert.” The popular error,--as I believe it to be,--that Albert Durer was an engraver on wood, has not tended, in England, where his works as a painter are but little known, to increase his reputation. Many persons on looking over the wood engravings which bear his mark have thought but meanly of their execution; and have concluded that his abilities as an artist were much over-rated, on the supposition that his fame chiefly rested on the presumed fact of his being the engraver of those works. Certain writers, too, speaking of him as a painter and an engraver on copper, have formed rather an unfavourable estimate of his talents, by comparing his pictures with those of his great Italian contemporaries,-- Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raffaele,--and by judging of his engravings with reference to the productions of modern art, in which the freedom and effect of etching are combined with the precision and clearness of lines produced by the burin. This, however, is judging the artist by an unfair standard. Though he has not attained, nor indeed attempted, that sublimity which seems to have been principally the aim of the three great Italian masters above mentioned, he has produced much that is beautiful, natural, and interesting; and which, though it may not stand so high in the scale of art as the grand compositions of his three great contemporaries, is no less necessary to its completion. The field which he cultivated, though not yielding productions so noble or splendid as theirs, was of greater extent and afforded greater variety. If they have left us more sublime conceptions of past and future events, Durer has transmitted to us more faithful pictures of the characters, manners, and customs of his own times. Let those who are inclined to depreciate his engravings on copper, as dry and meagre when compared with the productions of modern engravers, consider the state in which he found the art; and let them also recollect that he was not a mere translator of another person’s ideas, but that he engraved his own designs. Setting aside his merits as a painter, I am of opinion that no artist of the present day has produced, from his own designs, three such engravings as Durer’s Adam and Eve, St. Jerome seated in his chamber writing, and the subject entitled Melancolia.[V-57] Let it also not be forgotten that to Albert Durer we owe the discovery of etching; a branch