Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoying _objets d’art_ is to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since you have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the least true, since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before his trained hand came to draw. Well, to enjoy _objets d’art_ in that fashion, with tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, the intelligent poor man has really but to get the two chief series of Jacquemarts (those that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,’ are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty plates by different etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were among the principal, which Holloway published about a score of years since--‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent folio, the men who have just been mentioned, and several others, followed hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in some of those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular--absolutely unctuous. What a treatment of _cristal de roche_! Desgoffe’s painted panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment of ivory!--that extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of Poltalloch’s. But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say. ‘Copyists’--No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and vivid. Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank Short and William Strang have long seemed to me the most interesting, notwithstanding the as yet somewhat marked limitations of theme of the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness which I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the other. Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however much he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it, to my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I have but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more, and when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and a Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not putting those mezzotints--interpretations so brilliant, translations so faithful yet so free--by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not by familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming line or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is a most delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’ and ‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.