Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/71

 little hope for the beginner to enter the lists and successfully bear off in triumph any prize from so formidable an array of experts.

Luckily for him and happily for all those who love good work, there is a multitude of engravers on the lower slopes whose names are not so familiar to the barterers in the market-place. One recalls the query of Oldbuck to Lovel in "The Antiquary": "And where lies your vein?—are you inclined to soar to the higher regions of Parnassus, or to flutter around the base of the hill?" In print collecting it is safer and wiser to leave the peaks to astute or wealthy collectors, and although one need not flutter around the base of the hill, it is advisable not to be too ambitious nor too confident at first.

Let not the beginner despair of procuring bargains nowadays. A penny for a Whistler, a penny for a Boyd-Houghton, a penny for a Sandys! Surely this must make his blood tingle. The old connoisseur will sneer at this. Let us bid him go back to his "states" and his unique examples. The poor man's patch need not contain all weeds. There are heaps of fine wood engravings of the sixties which may be bought at a penny apiece. Old magazines at a shilling or a couple of shillings a volume contain dozens of examples by Millais, Pinwell, Fred. Walker, Sandys the incomparable, and many another man whose name is better known to the German scholar than to the English lover of the fine arts. The writer knows of orders placed by German firms for all the illustrated English books of the period from 1860 to 1870 with an English bookseller. Truly a man is