In spite of the dissimilarity of their talents, Raimbach and Cousins may yet be compared as the last English engravers who attempted to invest their work with a character in conformity with the strict conditions of the art. Since them the London craftsmen have practised more or less skilfully an almost mechanical profession. They have only produced either the thousands of engravings, which every year proceed from the same source, or the prints that deal with still less ambitious subjects--animals, attributes of the chase, and so forth--on an absurdly large scale. They have, indeed, gone so far as to represent life-size dogs, cats, and game. There is even a certain plate, after Landseer, whose sole interest is a parrot on its perch, and which is much larger than the plates that used to be engraved from the largest compositions of the masters. To say the least, here are errors of taste not to be redeemed by improvements in the manufacture of tools, nor even by ingenious combinations of the different processes of engraving. However skilful contemporary English engravers may be in some respects, they cannot properly be said to produce works of art; because they insist on technique to an inordinate degree, and in like measure reduce almost to nothing the proportions of true art and sentiment. One might, with still greater reason, thus explain the mediocrity of American prints in the present day. Few as they are, they do not rivet attention as the manifestations of an art which, young and inexperienced, is yet vital in its artlessness; on the contrary, they are depressing as the products of an art fallen into the sluggishness of old age. It is as though engraving in the United States had begun in decay--or rather, it may be, negatively, with no tendency to change, and no impulse to progress. Mostly mezzotints or aquatints, the prints sold in New York and New Orleans suggest that their authors only wished to appropriate as best they could the present fashions and methods of English engraving. As for work in line, it is almost entirely confined to the embellishment of bank notes and tradesmen's cards. Some of its professors are not without technical knowledge and a sort of skill; and if it were absolutely necessary to find a characteristic specimen of American art it should, perhaps, be sought amongst works of this sort. In any case, it is best to reserve a definitive opinion, and simply to state what American engraving is, and must be, till a master arise by whose influence and example it may be animated and renewed.