dreadful series of mishaps attended our fresco-painters at Westminster, and now even the promising water-glass process, in which Maclise trusted, shows the bloom of premature decay. The safest and best known of modern processes, simple oil-painting has its own dangers also. The colors sink and alter; they lose their relative values; they lose their pearly purity, their glowing transparence--they turn to buff and black. The fine arts bristle all over with technical difficulties, and are, I will not say the best school of patience in the world, for many other pursuits are also very good schools of patience; but I will say, without much fear of contradiction from anybody acquainted with the subject, that the fine arts offer drudgery enough, and disappointment enough, to be a training both in patience and in humility. In the labor of the line-engraver both these qualities are developed to the pitch of perfect heroism. He sits down to a great surface of steel or copper, and day by day, week after week, month after month, ploughs slowly his marvellous lines. Sometimes the picture before him is an agreeable companion; he is in sympathy with the painter; he enjoys every touch that he has to translate. But sometimes, on the contrary, he hates the picture, and engraves it as a professional duty. I happened to call upon a distinguished English engraver--a man of the greatest taste and knowledge, a refined and cultivated critic--and I found him seated at work before a thing which had nothing to do with fine art--a medley of ugly portraits of temperance celebrities on a platform. "Ah!" he said to me sadly, "you see the dark side of our profession; fancy sitting down to a desk all day long for two years together with that thing to occupy your thoughts!" How much moral fibre was needed to carry to a successful issue so repulsive a task as that! You may answer that a stone-breaker on the roadside surpasses my line-engraver both in patience and in humility; but whereas the sensitiveness of the stone-breaker has been deadened by his mode of life, the sensitiveness of the engraver has been continually fostered and increased. An ugly picture was torture to his cultivated eye, and he had to bear the torture all day long, like the pain of an irritating disease. Still even the line-engraver has secret sources of entertainment to relieve the mortal tedium of his task-work. The picture may be hideous, but the engraver has hidden consolations in the exercise of his wonderful art. He can at least entertain himself with feats of interpretative skill, with the gentle treacheries of improving here and there upon the hatefulness of the intolerable original. He may congratulate himself in the evening, that one more frightful hat or coat has been got rid of; that the tiresome task has been reduced by a space measurable in eights of an inch. The heaviest work which shows progress is not without _one_ element of cheerfulness.