From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was little appreciated--for appreciation came to him early--but lack of health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his father’s _Histoire de la Porcelaine_ and those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form, as they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere are such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional good fortune of auction rooms--snatched in a spare half-hour--has brought to a life-long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of sword-handles and daggers--things, some of them, that ‘rend and rip’-- ‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways, Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint devising--’ as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I remember, at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched such blades! By this print of his there is one of a seventeenth-century watch--just such a watch as I said used to be fished up from the bed of the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset--and with it the presentment of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a carved mirror, or a bit of Valenciennes porcelain.