He probably made many others during his apprenticeship. When that expired, bidding adieu to _red lions_ and _green dragons_, he endeavoured to attain such knowledge of drawing as would enable him to delineate the human figure, and transfer his _burin_ from silver to copperplate. In this attempt he had to encounter many difficulties; engraving on copper was so different an art from engraving on silver, that it was necessary he should _un_learn much which he had already learned; and at twenty years of age, habits are too deeply rooted to be easily eradicated; so that he never attained the power of describing that clear, beautiful stroke which was then given by some foreign artists, and has since been brought, I believe, to its utmost perfection by Sir Robert Strange. In his first efforts he had little more assistance than could be acquired by casual communications, or imitating the works of others;[4] those of Callot were probably his first models; and shop-bills and book-plates his first performances. Some of these, with impressions from tankards and tea-tables which escaped the crucible, have, by the laudable industry of collectors, been preserved to the present day. How far they add to the artist's fame, or are really of the value at which they are sometimes purchased, is a question of too high import for me to decide. By the connoisseur it is asserted, that the earliest productions of a great painter ought to be preserved, for they soar superior to the mature labours of plodding dulness, and though but seeds of that genius intended by nature to tower above its contemporaries, invariably exhibit _clear marks of mind_; as every variety in the branches of a strong-ribbed oak is, by the aid of a microscope, discoverable in the acorn. By the opposite party it is urged, that collecting these _blotted leaves of fancy_, is burying a man of talents in the ruins of his _baby-house_; and that for the honour of his name, and _repose of his soul_, they ought to be consigned to the flames, rather than pasted in the _portfolio_.