Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/272

 which may be bought for pence. The auction-room turns its back on line engravings unless they happen to be by well-known men. Names are everything under the hammer. In out-of-the-way printsellers' shops in London and in the provinces there is untold wealth lying for the lover of prints—wealth of engraving. But golden strokes of dead gravers' hands, are invisible to all who have not the understanding eye. These monuments of fine engraving, faithful translations, splendid triumphs over the technique of pushing the burin over the polished copper and ensnaring the feeling of the painter in the swirling lines and cross hatchings, lie in as proud seclusion as sleeping princesses awaiting the magic touch of the sagacious prince. Generations of engravers have come and gone. Their plates, worked with deft and patient skill, have sucked up the ink and left the flimsy record of their lives. Their names are lightly bitten on the roll of engravers, but to him who lingers lovingly over printsellers' portfolios to whom known names with fine marketable values are as in a world apart, there is a golden mine, magical and alluring as the cave down which Aladdin descended, where he gathered pearls and diamonds, rubies and amethysts, sapphires and emeralds from the magic garden.

Who knows James Peak or James Mason, with their wonderful interpretations of Claude Lorraine's landscapes? William Walker (1729-1793) we know from his Burns, by Nasmyth, and his Sir Walter Scott, but there are scores of his illustrations in the magazines of the period teeming with fine copperplate illustrations.