Meanwhile a Scotchman, honorable in Art, comes upon the scene,--Sir Robert Strange, born in the distant Orkneys in 1721, who abandoned the law for engraving. As a youthful Jacobite he joined the Pretender in 1745, sharing the disaster of Culloden, and owing his safety from pursuers to a young lady dressed in the ample costume of the period, whom he afterwards married in gratitude, and they were both happy. He has a style of his own, rich, soft, and especially charming in the tints of flesh, making him a natural translator of Titian. His most celebrated engravings are doubtless the _Venus_ and the _Danaë_ after the great Venetian colorist; but the _Cleopatra_, though less famous, is not inferior in merit. His acknowledged masterpiece is the Madonna of St. Jerome, called “_The Day_,” after the picture by Correggio in the Gallery of Parma; but his portraits after Van Dyck are not less fine, while they are more interesting,--as Charles the First, with a large hat, by the side of his horse, which the Marquis of Hamilton is holding; and that of the same monarch standing in his ermine robes; also the three royal children, with two King Charles spaniels at their feet; also Henrietta Maria, the Queen of Charles. That with the ermine robes is supposed to have been studied by Raffaello Morghen, called sometimes an imitator of Strange.[173] To these I would add the rare autograph portrait of the engraver, being a small head after Greuzé, which is simple and beautiful. One other name will close this catalogue. It is that of William Sharp, who was born at London in 1746, and died there in 1824. Though last in order, this engraver may claim kindred with the best. His first essays were the embellishment of pewter pots, from which he ascended to the heights of Art, showing a power rarely equalled. Without any instance of peculiar beauty, his works are constant in character and expression, with every possible excellence of execution: face, form, drapery,--all are as in Nature. His splendid qualities appear in the _Doctors of the Church_, which has taken its place as the first of English engravings. It is after the picture of Guido, once belonging to the Houghton Gallery, which in an evil hour for English taste was allowed to enrich the collection of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg; and I remember well that this engraving by Sharp was one of the few ornaments in the drawing-room of Macaulay when I last saw him, shortly before his lamented death. Next to the _Doctors of the Church_ is his _Lear in the Storm_, after the picture by West, now in the Boston Athenæum, and his _Sortie from Gibraltar_, after the picture by Trumbull, also in the Boston Athenæum. Thus, through at least two of his masterpieces whose originals are among us, is our country associated with this great artist.