Sir Seymour Haden has told us that Meryon’s method was to make a number of sketches, two or three inches square, of parts of his picture, which he put together and arranged into a harmonious whole.  Herkomer says that he “used the burin in finishing his bitten work with marvellous skill.  No better combination can be found of the harmonious combination of the two.”  Burty declared that “Meryon preserves the characteristic detail of architecture...  Without modifying the aspect of the monument he causes it to express its hidden meaning, and gives it a broader significance by associating it with his own thought.”  His employment of a dull green paper at times showed his intimate feeling for tonalities.  He is, more so than Piranesi, the Rembrandt of architecture.  Hamerton admits that the French etcher was “one of the greatest and most original artists who have appeared in Europe,” and berates the public of the ’60s for not discovering this.  Then this writer, copying in an astonishingly wretched manner several of Meryon’s etchings, analysing their defects as he proceeds, asserts that there is false tonality in Le Stryge.  “The intense black in the street under the tower of St. Jacques destroys the impression of atmosphere, though at a considerable distance it is as dark as the nearest raven’s wing, which cannot relieve itself against it.  This may have been done in order to obtain a certain arrangement of black and white patches,” etc.  This was done for the sheer purpose of oppositional effects.  Did Hamerton see a fine plate?  The shadow is heavy; the street is in demi, not total, obscurity; the values of the flying ravens and the shadow are clearly enunciated.  The passage is powerful, even sensational, and in the Romantic, Hugoesque key.  Hamerton is wrong.  Meryon seldom erred.  His was a temperament of steel and fire.

JOHN MARTIN, MEZZOTINTER

The sitting-room was long and narrow.  A haircloth sofa of uncompromising rectitude was pushed so close to the wall that the imprints of at least two generations of heads might be discerned upon the flowered wall-paper—­flowers and grapes of monstrous size from some country akin to that visited by the Israelitish spies as related in the Good Book.  A mahogany sideboard stood at the upper end of the room; in one window hung a cage which contained a feeble canary.  As you entered your eyes fell upon an ornamental wax fruit piece under a conical glass.  A stuffed bird, a robin redbreast, perched on a frosted tree in the midst of these pale tropical offerings, glared at you with beady eyes.  Antimacassars and other things of horror were in the room.  Also a centre table upon which might have been found Cowper’s poems, the Bible, Beecher’s sermons, and an illustrated book about the Holy Land by some hardworking reverend.  It was Aunt Jane’s living-room; in it she had rocked and knitted for more than half a century.  There were a few pictures