The drawback of such pastimes, innocent enough in themselves, was that they degraded art into a frivolous amusement, and promulgated a false view of its capabilities and real object. This is what very generally happens when, on the strength of a certain degree of taste, mistaken for talent, people aspire to compass, without reflection or study, results only to be attained by knowledge and experience. The authors of such hasty work think art easy, because they are ignorant of its essentials; and the public, in its turn mistaken as to these, accepts appearances for reality, becomes accustomed to the pretence of merit, and loses all taste for true superiority. Every art may be thus perverted; and in our own days, amateur water colours, statuettes, and waltzes are as injurious to painting, sculpture, and music, as, in former days, the amusement of print-making was to engraving. Moreover, it was not art only that these prints began to injure. Prompted by gallantry, as understood by the younger Crébillon and Voisenon when they wrote their experiences, they often presented to the eyes of women scenes to the description of which they would not have listened: as a certain lady is reported to have asked Baron de Besenval, during the relation of an embarrassing adventure, to "draw a picture-puzzle of what he couldn't tell her." Often, however, engraving, as practised in the salons, appealed to quite another order of passions and ideas. In support of the great cause of the day--philosophy--all weapons seemed fair, and the needle was used to disseminate the new evangel. When Mme. de Pompadour, in her little engraving, the proofs of which were fought for by her courtiers, attempted to show "The Genius of the Arts Protecting France," she set no very dangerous example, and only proved one thing--that the said Genius did not so carefully protect the kingdom as to exclude the possibility of platitude. But when the _habitués_ of Mme. d'Épinay and D'Holbach set themselves in their little prints to attack certain so-called mental superstitions, they unconsciously opened the door to people of a more radical turn of mind. Before the end of the century prints a good deal more crudely energetic appeared on the same subject; and the pothouse engravers, in their turn, illustrated the _Père Duchêne_, as the drawing-room engravers had illustrated the "Essai sur les Mœurs" and the "Encyclopédie."