Whilst Bervic was counted the greatest French engraver, Italy boasted of a man, his inferior in reality, but whom, in the existing dearth of talent, his countrymen agreed to thrust into the glorious eminence of a master. Like Canova, his senior by a few years only, Raphael Morghen had the good fortune to be born at the right time. Both second-rate artists, they would have passed almost unnoticed in a more favoured century; as it was, in the absence of contemporary rivals, their compatriots accepted their accidental superiority as a proof of absolute merit. Moreover, by merely submitting in some sort to the dictates of opinion and of public taste, their popularity and success were easily assured. The writings of Winckelmann and Raphael Mengs had brought antique statues and Italian pictures of the sixteenth century once more into favour; so that Canova, by imitating the former more or less cleverly, and Morghen by engraving the latter, could neither of them fail to please, and it is especially to their choice of subjects that we must attribute the great reputation they both enjoyed. Morghen, the pupil and son-in-law of Volpato, whose weak engravings from the "Stanze," in the Vatican, are known to every one, shared with that feeble artist, and with Longhi, the privilege of reproducing admirable paintings, which had either never been engraved, or not since the time of the masters. This alone gives a certain value to his plates, faulty as they are. Assuredly, for instance, the engraving of Leonardo's "Last Supper" reproduces no more than the general lines of the composition and the attitude of the figures. We look at it as we might listen to an inferior actor reading verses from "Polyeucte" or "Athalie," because the inspiration of the master is still to be felt, in spite of the intermediary of expression; only the sort of beauty inherent in the conception and arrangement of the original remains in this piece of Morghen's. What can be said of the head of the Saviour, like those of the Apostles, _restored_ by the engraver, and unillumined by the faintest glimmer of sentiment? How is it possible, examining the work in detail, not to be offended by the arrogance of the technique and the display of mere mechanical facility, when one remembers the incomparable accuracy of Leonardo and his perfection of style?