as a matter of course, since there was no other--which we handle and hold up to the light with such sensitive reverence, was not yet grown venerable from the touch of long-vanished hands. They were as fresh as a busy industry of engravers, printers, and paper-makers could turn them out, and of a contemporary popularity that died early of a plethora. What, then, is their peculiar charm for us to-day, those colour-prints of stipple or mezzotint engravings which pervaded the later years of the eighteenth century, and the earliest of the nineteenth? No serious student, perhaps, would accord them a very high or important place in the history of art. Yet a pleasant little corner of their own they certainly merit, representing, as they do, a characteristic contemporary phase of popular taste, and of artistic activity, essentially English. Whatever may be thought of their intrinsic value as works of art, there is no denying their special appeal of pictorial prettiness and sentiment and of dainty decorative charm. Nor, to judge from the recent records of the sale-rooms, would this appeal seem to be of any uncertain kind. It has lately been eloquent enough to compete with the claims of artistic works of indisputable worth, and those collectors who have heard it for the first time only during the last ten years or so have had to pay highly for their belated responsiveness. Those, on the other hand, who listened long ago to the gentle appeal of the old English colour-prints, who listened before the market had heard it, and, loving them for their own pretty sakes, or their old-time illustrative interest, or their decorative accompaniment to Sheraton and Chippendale, would pick them up in the printsellers’ shops for equitable sums that would now be regarded as “mere songs,” can to-day look round their walls at the rare and brilliant impressions of prints which first charmed them twenty or thirty years ago, and smile contentedly at the inflated prices clamorous from Christie’s. For nowadays the decorative legacy of the eighteenth century--a legacy of dignity, elegance, beauty, charm--seems to involve ever-increasing legacy duties, which must be paid ungrudgingly.