The acknowledged beauties, however, did not monopolise the “placidness of content or consciousness of superiority,” which Dr. Johnson, so Johnsonianly, held was necessary to “expand the human face to its full expression.” Happily there were artists to see everywhere dainty and charming women who could be attractively pictured with the artistic sense of nature and actuality, perhaps even more picturesquely for not being able always to keep their temperaments out of their faces and attitudes. One of these artists was also an eminent engraver, and at the same time an extensive printseller and publisher, with always one eye to his art and the other to the main chance. John Raphael Smith loomed very large in the London print-world of the later eighteenth century, because he had not only the artistic ability to do the thing popularly wanted, but also the commercial intuition as to what would be likely to please the public in its varying fancies. A master of mezzotint, and monarch among the translators of Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney, he used with lighter touch the same medium for engraving many of his own vivacious picturings of contemporary social scenes, with their manners and fashions very much alive. A generous, convivial, cheerful liver himself, filling every hour with the activities of art, commerce and pleasure, J. R. Smith had the vivid pictorial eye for what was gay and pleasing in the life around him. Also he possessed an instinctive sense of fashion. Therefore, in the numerous attractive drawings of petty women in varied attitudes of busy idleness, we get a more real impression of the fashions of the passing hour than even the stately canvasses of Sir Joshua could give us with all their artistic defiance of the modistes. Smith would engrave these himself in stipple suggesting crayon effects, with the original artist’s freedom, and the mezzotinter’s broad handling of tones; or he would entrust them to other engravers. Being a painter, he used colour on his plates judiciously, and among the most highly-prized colour-prints of the period J. R. Smith’s spirited engravings hold quite an individual place. To name, perhaps, the most characteristic: _À Loisir_; _Black, Brown and Fair_; _Maid_; _Wife_; _Widow_; and _What you Will_; _A Christmas Holiday_; _Flirtilla_ and _Narcissa_; _The Fortune Tellers_; _The Mirror, Serena and Flirtilla_; _Thoughts on a Single Life_, with its companion, _Thoughts on Matrimony_, engraved quite as well by William Ward, at whose hands _The Widow’s Tale_ makes a charming appearance in coloured mezzotint. In this medium also _The Promenade at Carlisle House_ enjoys an elusive existence. Then there are Smith’s _Lecture on Gadding_ and _The Moralist_, stippled by Nutter, and his _Credulous Lady and the Astrologer_, by Simon. But not even his own designs inspired his mezzotint-scraper to finer results than the splendid _Almeria_ (Mrs. Meynott), after Opie, or his stipple-graver to surer beauty than in his _Mrs.