Ryland had called Bartolozzi into consultation, and the gifted Italian engraver, with his greater mastery of technique, his delicate sense of beauty, and his finer artistic perceptions, had seen all that might be done with the new way of stipple; he saw also its limitations. With enthusiasm Bartolozzi and Ryland had worked together till they had evolved from the crayon manner of François a process of engraving which proved so happily suited to the classes of fanciful and sentimental prints now fast becoming the vogue, that it simply jumped into a popularity which no other medium of the engraver’s art had ever attained. The stipple method may be thus described. The copper-plate was covered with an etching-ground, on to which the outlined picture was transferred from paper. Then the contours of the design were lightly etched in a series of dots, all the dark and middle shadows being rendered by larger or more closely etched dots, the later engravers using even minute groups of dots. This accomplished, the acid was next applied with very great care, and all the etched dots bitten in. The waxen ground was then removed from the plate, and the work with the dry-point and the curved stipple-graver was commenced. With these tools the lighter shadows were accomplished, and the bitten portions of the picture were deepened and strengthened wherever required, to attain greater fulness or brilliance of effect. Engraving in dots was, of course, no new thing; as an accessory to line-engraving it had often been called into service by the earlier artists. Giulio Campagnola, Albert Dürer, Agostino Veneziano, Ottavio Leoni, for example, had used it; we frequently find it employed by our own seventeenth-century line-men the better to suggest flesh-tones, and Ludwig von Siegen, in describing his invention of mezzotint in 1642, includes the “dotted manner” among the known forms of engraving. Then there was the _opus mallei_, or method of punching dots in the plate with a mallet and awl, which was successfully practised by Jan Lutma, of Amsterdam, late in the seventeenth century. This may be considered the true precursor of stipple, just as the harpsichord, with the same keyboard, but a different manner of producing the notes, was the precursor of the pianoforte; but it must have been a very laborious process, and Lutma found few imitators.