Sketches in oil or water-colour by Cotman and James Ward, by Thomas Collier and Charles Green, Edwin Hayes, Alfred East, Shannon, Linton, Fulleylove, Carl Haag, Wyke Bayliss, Francis James--I need not finish the list, and it would be foreign to the present purpose to enlarge on the men--do something, one may hope, to prevent one’s bowing the knee at only a single shrine. But is that indeed my danger?--I, who confess to have felt at times the force of quite another temptation--the temptation to be busy at last in getting together things with which the pictorial Art that I love has nothing to do. A comely little piece or so of ‘Blue and White’; a bit of Worcester, with the square mark; a Nantgarw plate, with its ‘Billingsley rose’; a plate of Frankenthal, bought in the Corratorie at Geneva, at a shop where, two generations ago, they had sold things of that fabric to none other than Balzac (who declared, through his _Cousin Pons_, that Frankenthal would one day be as much sought after as Sèvres)--these things, I say, the thin end of the wedge, things that are nothing by themselves, remind me that, in gathering china, Man may be happy. And so a few books--the earliest obtained being the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, _relieure Janséniste_, a green coat by Riviere, and the Rogers with the Turner illustrations, in ‘original boards,’ now, alas! disposed to crack--assure me of the charm that must lurk for my luckier brethren in the seriously gathering together of First Editions or of famous ones. Let us pass to the examples of the Revival of Etching. About forty Méryons, about seventy Whistlers, are mine. The one artist has been much more prolific than the other, and thus, while, as regards Méryon, the possession of even ‘forty’ prints allows the collector to be fairly well provided for, as regards Whistler, the ‘seventy’ represent scarcely a third part of that etcher’s catalogued work. Mr. H. S. Theobald has more Whistlers than I have; so has Sir John Day; Mr. B. B. Macgeorge, of Glasgow, has, I know, more Méryons; while, of both these masters, distinctly larger collections than my own rest in the hands of Mr. Samuel P. Avery and of Mr. Howard Mansfield, of New York. Nearly all the finer plates of Méryon--those in which, to use his own phrase, he ‘engraved Paris,’ with a fidelity so affectionate, yet with an imagination so tragic--were wrought between the year 1850 and the year 1854. Bracquemond was the only important figure in the group to whom the Revival of Etching is due, who was working at that time. Whistler, Seymour Haden, Jules Jacquemart, and Legros, were all of them a little later; Whistler’s first dated plate--and he was quite among the earliest of these artists--being of the year 1857.