Early in the succeeding reign they were removed to the Queen’s House, now Buckingham Palace, where they were taken from the frames and bound up in two volumes, forming a part of the large collection of drawings, similarly bound, got together by George III. The suggestion that they should be engraved originated with Dalton, the keeper of the King’s drawings, but the work was so badly done that it was abandoned in 1774 after ten plates only had been issued. The engraver was George Vertue, who, according to Walpole, was the originator of the project. “It is a great pity,” he says, “that they have not been engraved; not only that such frail performances of so great a genius might be preserved, but that the resemblances of so many illustrious persons, nowhere else existing, might be saved from destruction. Vertue had undertaken this noble work; and after spending part of three years on it, broke off, I do not know why, after having traced off, on oil paper, but about five and thirty. These I bought at his sale; and they are so exactly taken as to be little inferior to the originals.”[572] This tracing was done by Vertue and Müntz when the drawings were hanging in Queen Caroline’s room at Kensington. There were thirty-four of them, and they were framed and hung in what Walpole called his Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill. Somewhat later the projected publication was taken up again more successfully, on the suggestion, according to Dallaway, of Horace Walpole, under the direction of John Chamberlaine, who succeeded Dalton as keeper of the drawings. The engravings were published between 1792 and 1800 in fourteen numbers, containing eighty-two portraits, forming two large folio volumes, under the title of _Imitations of Original Drawings by Hans Holbein, in the Collection of His Majesty, for the Portraits of Illustrious Persons of the Court of Henry VIII, with Biographical Tracts_. The historical notices were written by Edmund Lodge, Lancaster Herald, and the plates, with the exception of eight, were engraved by F. Bartolozzi, R.A. F. C. Lewis was also engaged to take part in the work, but his plate of “Cecilia Heron” was in all ways so much finer than Bartolozzi’s efforts that Chamberlaine had the plate destroyed, fearing that if it were published side by side with the others, the latter would suffer so severely from the contrast that the success of the publication would be endangered. As transcripts of Holbein’s drawings, Bartolozzi’s engravings have very little artistic merit. Many of them, indeed, have small likeness to the originals, and all of them lack the strength and character and the searching truth of line which make the drawings themselves such masterpieces of art. In more recent years the drawings have been frequently photographed and published, the most important series being that issued by Mr. F. Hanfstaengl in two volumes, with an introduction and descriptive notes by the late Sir Richard Holmes, F.S.A. It should be added that under