It would be beside our purpose to enter upon any criticism of “The Forge” as an engraving; its merits having been already fully recognised by the art journals. The execution of the work occupied Sharples’s leisure evening hours during a period of five years; and it was only when he took the plate to the printer that he for the first time saw an engraved plate produced by any other man. To this unvarnished picture of industry and genius, we add one other trait, and it is a domestic one. “I have been married seven years,” says he, “and during that time my greatest pleasure, after I have finished my daily labour at the foundry, has been to resume my pencil or graver, frequently until a late hour of the evening, my wife meanwhile sitting by my side and reading to me from some interesting book,”—a simple but beautiful testimony to the thorough common sense as well as the genuine right-heartedness of this most interesting and deserving workman. The same industry and application which we have found to be necessary in order to acquire excellence in painting and sculpture, are equally required in the sister art of music—the one being the poetry of form and colour, the other of the sounds of nature. Handel was an indefatigable and constant worker; he was never cast down by defeat, but his energy seemed to increase the more that adversity struck him. When a prey to his mortifications as an insolvent debtor, he did not give way for a moment, but in one year produced his ‘Saul,’ ‘Israel,’ the music for Dryden’s ‘Ode,’ his ‘Twelve Grand Concertos,’ and the opera of ‘Jupiter in Argos,’ among the finest of his works. As his biographer says of him, “He braved everything, and, by his unaided self, accomplished the work of twelve men.”