But when we come to _Le Petit Pont_ (plate 7), etched in the same year as these copies after Zeeman, and exhibited in the Salon of 1850, we are aware of quite a different vision, a different order of intellect, as well as greater perfection of technical skill. It is becoming difficult for us after the lapse of seventy years, in which so many other etchers have been working on Meryon’s lines, to realise how new, how epoch-making in the strict sense of the word, was such an etching as _Le Petit Pont_ in 1850. There had been fine engravers and etchers of architecture before Meryon; there had been Hollar, there had been Canale, Piranesi and Rossini. But they in their different degrees were facile and fluent, rhetorical, diffuse, commercial, in comparison with the severe, tense, concentrated style of Meryon. In his “Eaux-Fortes sur Paris,” which extend in date from 1850 to 1854, he achieved a body of work which led the way in what is called the modern revival of etching and in its own special style has never been surpassed, though other etchers have triumphed in other styles of etching which were entirely outside Meryon’s limited compass. Not only was he in advance of all the other notable etchers of his generation, but he had finished this series of masterpieces before the others had begun to produce anything of importance. Millet began to etch in 1855; Whistler’s Paris set dates from 1858; Haden, though he had etched in the forties, did little that really counts till about 1858. Jacque and Daubigny were working before Meryon, but they are hardly in the same class. It was consonant with Meryon’s brooding, introspective temperament that he took the work of etching very seriously. He acquired a profound knowledge of the technique of the art and applied it, in the case of all his important etchings, with conscientious thoroughness. Disdaining anything like a sketchy treatment of his subject, he built up the whole design laboriously, painfully, with tireless perseverance, after making the most conscientious studies of detail. He was, in fact, by habit and temperament more an engraver than an etcher, though he used the etching process instead of attacking the copper with a burin.