The French Revolution, and the wars that followed, temporarily ruined our foreign trade in prints, the great fortune that Boydell had made by his judicious speculation in the talents of his countrymen, melting away under these adverse influences, and leaving him a ruined man by 1802. But as Boydell's star sank, that of another art-publisher, presumably less dependent on foreign trade, rose above the horizon. Rudolf Ackermann (1764-1834), the son of a Saxon coachbuilder, came to London about 1775, and after ten years spent in making designs for coachbuilders, set up for himself in the Strand as an art-publisher and dealer in fancy goods. Ackermann proved himself a man of really remarkable energy and initiative, with a mind always open to the reception of new ideas, and a spirit of commercial enterprise that was based upon artistic taste and sound judgment. He was also one of the few men who have ever successfully combined business and philanthropy on a large scale. During the years that followed the Reign of Terror, he was the chief employer of the French _emigrés_ in London, finding occupation for no fewer than fifty nobles, priests, and ladies, in the manufacture of screens, card-racks, and other articles for his "fancy department." Irrespective of his business as an art-publisher, this extraordinary man patented an invention for rendering cloth and paper waterproof, made experiments in air-balloons for the dissemination of news in war-time, designed Nelson's funeral-car, introduced lithography for the purposes of art-illustration into this country, raised and distributed a large sum for the relief of sufferers after the battle of Leipsic, undertook the same good offices for the Prussian soldiers after Waterloo, and was a generous employer to the Spanish exiles who took refuge in England in 1815. His Wednesday evening conversazione at the Repository of Arts, 101 Strand, became quite a feature in the literary and artistic world after 1813, while he played the part of protector and adviser to the more unpractical of the authors and illustrators who were employed upon his various undertakings. Turning to Ackermann's numerous and valuable art-publications, we find that very early in his business career he was one of the chief employers of Rowlandson, the caricaturist, to whom he eventually became a kind of "foster-publisher," just as Humphrey was the foster-publisher of Gillray. THOMAS ROWLANDSON