In Paris he resumed his colour-printing, inspiring and influencing many disciples and imitators, among them Jacques Fabian Gautier D’Agoty, who afterwards claimed to have invented Le Blon’s process, and transmitted it to his sons. In Paris, in 1741, Le Blon died, very, very poor, but still working upon his copper-plates. It was doubtless during Le Blon’s last years in Paris that Horace Walpole met him. “He was a Fleming (_sic_), and very far from young when I knew him, but of surprising vivacity and volubility, and with a head admirably mechanic; but an universal projector, and with, at least, one of the qualities that attend that vocation, either a dupe or a cheat: I think the former, though, as most of his projects ended in the air, the sufferers believed the latter. As he was much an enthusiast, perhaps like most enthusiasts he was both one and t’other.” As a matter of fact, Le Blon was neither a dupe nor a cheat; he was simply a pioneer with all the courage of his imagination and invention; and no less an authority than Herr Hans W. Singer, of Vienna, has considered him, with all his failures and shortcomings, of sufficient artistic importance to be worthy of a monograph. If, by a more judicious selection of pictures for copying, Le Blon had been able to create a popular demand, and to ensure general encouragement for his venture, how different might have been the story of colour-printing, how much fuller its annals. For Le Blon’s ultimate failure was not owing to the comparative impossibility or getting infallibly the required harmonics of his tones with only the three cardinal colours, and the necessity to add a fourth plate with a qualifying black, or to the difficulty in achieving the exactness of register essential to the perfect fusing of the tones of several plates. Those were serious obstacles, certainly, hindering complete artistic success; but, judging from the surprising excellence of the best of Le Blon’s actual achievements, they would doubtless have been surmounted for all practical purposes. The real cause of the failure was, I suggest, that the pictures actually reproduced made no appeal to the people of England, consequently there was no public demand for the prints. It was a close time for the fine arts in this country. The day of the public picture-exhibition was nearing, but it had not yet arrived. The aristocratic collector and the fashionable connoisseur represented the taste of the country, for popular taste there was none. Romance and sentiment were quite out of fashion, and the literature of the day was entirely opposed to them. Nor were there any living painters with even one touch of nature. The reign of George I. was indeed a depressing time for the graphic arts. Society, heavily bewigged and monstrously behooped, was too much concerned with its pastimes and intrigues, its affectations, caprices and extravagances, to cultivate any taste or care for beauty. Kent, the absurdly