Earlier than this, however, Sir Robert Strange, who hated Bartolozzi, and for whom line-engraving alone represented the dignity of the engraver’s art, had predicted a sort of artistic _débâcle_ through the popularity of stipple-engraving. “From the nature of the operation,” he wrote, “and the extreme facility with which it is executed, it has got into the hands of every boy, of every printseller in town, of every manufacturer of prints, however ignorant and unskilful. I call them manufacturers, because the general run of such productions does not in reality merit the appellation of works of art and must ultimately tend to depreciate the fine arts in general, to glut the public, and to vitiate the growing taste of the nation. This art, if to it may be called, is in itself extremely limited, admits of little variety, and is susceptible of no improvement.” Naturally, the great line-engraver, who had worked for his fame through long arduous years, was vexed to see the very effects of soft flesh tones, which he produced to admiration with laborious mastery of point and graver, rendered so easily by stipple, and even more popularly appreciated. Yet there was a good deal of truth in his protest. The public was in time glutted, not with finely engraved colour-prints, but with inferior stippling of weak designs, much of it crudely coloured by hand, or printed with no sense of art; but the fine arts in general were not in the least depreciated through such things. And now the charming little art has, at its old-time best, found enthusiastic lovers again, while the noble beauty of line-engraving is to-day appreciated by only the limited few. “If Strange could but re-visit the glimpses of Christie’s, it would more than astonish him to see there none of his own superb line-engravings after the great Italian masters, but to hear the keen bidding for his old rival Bartolozzi’s best colour-prints after Reynolds, or the Downman _Duchess of Devonshire_ and _Lady Duncannon_, the Cipriani infants, _Contentment_, _Friendship_, the Hamilton _Months_, or Miss Benwell’s _St. James’s_ and _St. Giles’s Beauties_, or the _Orange Girl_.