For Ryland this meant another spell of prosperity: it also meant disaster. His constant thirst for pleasure, and his ambition to shine as a fine gentleman, stimulated by such easy and seemingly inexhaustible means of money-making, led him into fatal extravagances. Accused of forging a bill, instead of facing the charge, of which he protested his innocence, he stupidly hid himself and tried ineffectually to cut his own throat. After that, some flimsy evidence procured his condemnation, and, as William Blake, looking in Ryland’s face, had predicted years before, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1783. They could have done no worse to a highwayman; and, after all, by the introduction of stipple-engraving Ryland had certainly increased the people’s stock of harmless pleasure. In his own stippling there was a delicacy of touch, a smoothness of effect, equal to Bartolozzi’s, but with less tenderness and suppleness of tone. Evidently he formed his style to suit the designs of Angelica Kauffman, which it rendered with appreciation of their refinement. This will be seen in the charming _Cupid bound to a Tree by Nymphs_, among our illustrations, and many other pleasing plates, such as _Venus presenting Helen to Paris_, _Beauty crowned by Love_, _The Judgment of Paris_, _Ludit Amabiliter_, _O Venus Regina_, _Olim Truncus_, _Dormio Innocuus_, _Juno Cestum_, _Maria_, from Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey,” for which Miss Benwell, the painter, is said to have sat; _Patience and Perseverance_; _Morning Amusement_, a fanciful portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, embroidering at a tambour-frame, and wearing the Turkish costume which she so graphically describes in one of her letters, and in which Kneller had painted her at the instigation of Pope; fancy portraits, too, of the adventurous Lady Hester Stanhope, and Mary, Duchess of Richmond.