Still, the line-engraver, with all his splendid art, is not the master that moulds the destiny of William Wynne. Among the numerous pupils of Le Bas is an ingenious person named Gilles Demarteau, who is practising a new method of working his copper plate with tiny dots which make the finished print as smooth and soft as a drawing in chalk. Out of this arises a vehement artistic causerie, for it is a sure fact that a man of forty, one Jean Charles François, has received a pension of 600 francs for this same invention, which, some say, another before him invented after all. Ryland, no doubt, learns everything he can from both pioneers, without troubling to ascertain the original discoverer, and, as this ‘stipple’ manner takes his fancy, he soon becomes as dexterous as those who teach him. Further, he finds that this same dotted plate may be tinted by the engraver’s brush, giving an almost perfect illusion of a picture in water-colours. At last the young Welshman makes up his mind to complete the grand tour, without which the education of an artist is incomplete. Some say that the medal he gained at the Académie Royale entitles him to free tuition at Rome. At all events, he flies south to blunt his pencil upon the gnarled contours of Michael Angelo, and to shade the tender lines of Raphael--for the immortals of Leyden and Seville have not yet thrown these high priests from their altar. This same enterprise proves of much service to him when, in a year or two, the great lords at home wish him to transcribe, in the novel ‘Demarteau-after-Boucher’ fashion, their collections of the great masters. Hitherto he has been true to his first love, the line-engraving, in the dainty fashion of Le Bas, and the Parisian connoisseurs of ’57, who glue their glasses upon the rounded limbs of Leda toying with her swan--a print after Boucher which Ryland has pulled from his plate--acknowledge that some good has come from Angleterre at last. With this same work the Welsh engraver first woos the British public, showing it at the Exhibition of the Society of Artists in Spring Gardens in the May of ’61. About this date, after an absence of five summers, when he is in his twenty-ninth year, he returns home to England. Chance has much in store for him. For a long time the canny Prime Minister, known to most of his fellow-countrymen as the Boot--an opprobrious, not a popular term,--has been looking out for a cheap line in engravings. Some time ago, courtly fellow-Scot Allan Ramsay had painted wonderful portraits of the noble favourite and royal Prince George; so, when the first was Premier and the other Defender of the Faith, it became necessary for the welfare of the nation that their lineaments should be scattered broadcast through the medium of a copper-plate.