Meanwhile, the prints of Hogarth, with their marvellous pictorial invention, mordant satire, and moral illumination, took the fancy of the town without the lure of colour, and cultivated in the popular mind a new sense of picture, concerned with the live human interest of the passing hour. Other line-engravers, too,--Vivares, Woollett, Ravenet, Major, Strange,--with more masterly handling of the graver, were, through the new appeal of landscape, or the beauties of Rembrandt and the Italian masters, or the homely humours of Dutch _genre_, winning back the popular favour for their art. Though the call for the colour-print had not yet arrived, the way was preparing for it. With this widening public interest in pictorial art, a dainty sense of tone was awakened by the porcelain now efflorescing all aver the country. Then, when Reynolds was bringing all the graces to his easel, the urbane influence for beauty spread from the master’s painting-room at 47, Leicester Fields--as the Square was then called--to all the print-shops in town. And the year--1764--that saw the death of Hogarth was the year in which Francesco Bartolozzi came to England, bringing with him into the engraving-world fresh influences of grace and delicacy which gradually ripened for colour. II. The sentimental mood for the storied picture was now being fostered by the universal reading of the novel, which in its mid-eighteenth-century form gave its readers new experiences in the presentation of actual contemporary life, with analysis of their feelings and cultivation of there sensibilities. Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Sophia Western and Amelia, Olivia, Maria, were as living in interest as any of the beautiful high-born ladies whose portraits in mezzotint, translated from the canvasses of the great painters, appealed from the printsellers’ windows in all the monochrome beauty of their medium. The public, steeped now in sentiment, wanted to see their imaginary heroines in picture: nor had they long to wait. The Royal Academy had become a vital factor in forming public taste, and the printsellers’ shops were its mirrors. But not all its members and exhibitors were Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses. There were, for instance, Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, with their seductive Italian graces of design; there was Bartolozzi, with his beautiful draughtsmanship, and his brilliant facile craft on the copper-plate, but the medium that should bring these into familiar touch with popular taste was still to seek. However, it was at hand, and the man who found this medium, and brought it to the service of popular art, was William Wynne Ryland, “engraver to the King.”