It is the splendid work of Crome among the Norfolk coppices--among the fields studded here and there with cattle, but chiefly in the tangle of the wood, or where the wood-path winds under the rustic palings, and then through undergrowth, and out into the rising meadow, to be lost at last, a thread against the horizon sky--it is this splendid tree-work, large, massive, intricate, pictorial, never narrowly faithful alone, that gives interest and value to Crom series of etchings. He did them mostly in the last years of his life (which closed in 1821), and it was always for pleasure and remembrance that he wrought them. Publication he cannot have intended, for he never did enough to be recognized a master while he lived, and his etched subjects gave him memoranda for his pictures, and were little records of places that he loved. Their merits came slowly to be known by some few; and the etchings, carelessly printed and ill-bitten, were given, here and there, by Crome to his friends. In 1834, his widow, I am told, issued an edition, which must have been very small, and four years later they came again in a measure before the lovers of Norfolk art, re-bitten by one Mr. Ninham, re-touched by one Mr. Edwards of Bungay, and issued with a short biography by Mr. Dawson Turner--a volume which may still be stumbled on at the booksellers. These later states are of slight artistic value. They tell us little of Crome which we may not know much better from other sources he has furnished, and much of their work is not Crom at all. The early states are, at least, “signed all over” by him. Amateurish enough in biting and in printing, they are yet pleasant, characteristic records. “At Bawburgh,” and “Near Hingham” (dated 1813), and “At Woodrising” are some of those that one would like to cherish: and cherished they ought to be, for the reasons I have named. Yet to put them beside even less admirable works which have enjoyed the ordinary conditions of fair presentation--the biting adequate, the printing careful, and the paper good--is to see them, of necessity, at a disadvantage. VII. COTMAN.