The experiment was of considerable interest, but one has only to look at these colour-printed line-engravings, with their crude juxtaposition of tints, to feel thankful that our English line-engravers were not lured from their allegiance to the black and white proper to their art. Doubtless they recognised that colour was opposed to the very spirit of the line-engraver’s art, just as, a hundred years later, the stipple-engravers realised that it could often enhance the charm of their own. In the black and white of a fine engraving there is a quality in the balancing of relative tones which in itself answers to the need of colour, which, in fact, suggests colour to the imagination; so the beauty and dignity of the graven line in a master’s hands must repel any adventitious chromatic aid. A Faithorne print, for instance, with its lines and cross-hatchings in colours is inconceivable; although one might complacently imagine Francis Place and Gaywood having, not inappropriately, experimented with Barlow’s birds and beasts after the manner of those in Teyler’s book. If, however, there were any English engravings of that period on which Teyler’s method of colour-printing might have been tried with any possibility of, at least, a popular success, they were surely Pierce Tempest’s curious _Cryes of the City of London_, after “Old” Laroon’s designs, which antedated by just over a hundred years the charming Wheatley “Cries,” so familiar, so desirable, in coloured stipple. But this was not to be, and not until the new and facile mezzotint method had gradually over-shadowed in popularity the older and more laborious line-engraving was the first essay in colour-printing made in England. In the year 1719 came Jacob Christopher Le Blon with his new invention, which he called “Printing Paintings.” This invention was in effect a process of taking separate impressions, one over the other, from three plates of a desired picture, engraved in mezzotint, strengthened with line and etching, and severally inked each with the proportion of red, yellow, or blue, which, theorising according to Newton, Le Blon considered would go to make, when blended, the true colour-tones of any picture required. In fact, Le Blon practically anticipated the three-colour process of the present day; but in 1719 all the circumstances were against his success, bravely and indefatigably as he fought for it, influentially as he was supported.