Since the Catholic has become the spoilt child of contemporary literature, it is not surprising to find Wynne Ryland hailed as the victim of Protestant persecution. Yet there appears to be no evidence to support this assumption. There is not a line in the newspapers of the day to indicate that any anti-Romanist feeling was aroused, and had such been the case, the _Public Advertiser_, at all events, whose animosity towards ‘Popery’ is sufficiently evident, would have trumpeted loudly. It is significant that the mob never behaved with greater propriety--very unusual conduct in the howling Tyburn crowd--than on August 29, 1783. How different would it have been if the word had been whispered that a Papist was going to the gallows! Strutt and Angelo, who write so sympathetically of their friend, have nothing to say on this subject, and, indeed, accept his guilt as proved. Although the former, who wrote in 1785, might have reason for reticence, yet the latter, whose book was published a year before the Emancipation Act, could have no reason to suppress such evidence. Indeed, we have only the doubtful authority of the _Authentic Memoires_ for the statement that Ryland was a ‘supposed’ Catholic in his early youth. With this very ambiguous suggestion we must reconcile the strange fact that he was buried in a graveyard of the Established Church, and that the last rites were performed by an Anglican clergyman. There are one or two slips of the pen in Mrs Frankau’s interesting memoir. As the catalogue of the Royal Academy shows that Ryland contributed his first drawing in 1772--four years after the institution was established--he was not “one of the earliest exhibitors.” From the same catalogue it appears that the print-shop in the Strand was opened in 1774. The date of the publication of the _Authentic Memoires_, given as 1794, is, of course, a clerical error. Owing to the footnote attached to Ryland’s letter to Francis Donaldson of Liverpool, printed in the _Morning Post_, September 2, 1783, the document must be regarded with suspicion. No trivial disagreement with the conclusions of Mrs Frankau can diminish the interest of her delightful account of the great engraver, which must remain the most valuable of recent monographs. NOTE III.--There are references to W. W. Ryland in the innumerable dictionaries of painters and engravers, French, German, and English, such as Basan, Le Blanc, Portalis and Beraldi, Andreas Andrescen, Redgrave, Bryan, etc. One of the best of modern notices will be found in the _Print Collectors’ Handbook_, by Alfred Whitman. A LIST OF WILLIAM WYNNE RYLAND’S ENGRAVINGS. (By RUTH BLEACKLEY.)