The

and extraordinary conscientiousness of the painter-engraver in a light worthy of all our emulation. Turner, when he undertook 'The Liber,' being still a young man (he was thirty-two), we find him—having set his mind on the production of a work which should carry the art of the painter-engraver to the utmost limits of its capabilities-setting about his task without any settled idea as to the means best suited to his purpose, and practically ignorant of the processes he might find it necessary to employ; yet, in the spirit of the true artist, preferring to go through the drudgery of teaching himself those processes, and weighing for himself their exact value, to entrusting their application to other minds and other hands. indomitable struggle he underwent with his materials and the determination with which he mastered them are, indeed, strikingly apparent in those of the plates which we know to have been entirely executed by Turner himself. They are, however, most apparent in those three or four of them which we suppose to have been his earliest essays. Thus, supposing that aquatint would give him the best effect of atmosphere, we see him trying that process first, and in Loch Fyne'-a unique proof of which belonging to Mr. James Knowles is here-utterly breaking down with it. Then in Severn and Wye' trying aquatint for the sky and mezzotint (with a strong etching for its foundation) for the more solid parts of the picture—and in this meeting with complete success. Then in The Calm,' the very title of which suggests serenity and atmospheric transparency, he seems to have had the idea that aquatint with a soft-ground etching for a foundation would be best. Then-though we do not positively know which of these plates he did first, or whether, which is not unlikely, he had several of them in hand at the same time—it would look as if he had again gone back to Loch Fyne,' and, obliterating his first disaster by a mezzotint ground, to have brought it little by little to the perfection we see in the published plate. So again, in The Calm,' he seems, by changing spots of 'foul biting' into birds, and by replacing the 'soft' by a 'hard-ground' etching, and the original aquatint by mezzotint, to have obtained at last the effect he wished. In 'The Church,' also, and in more than one other plate we see the same tentative proceedings and the same final triumph. Now, it seems to me that all this is touchingly instructive, because here we have the greatest landscape painter the world has ever known humbling himself almost to the point of personal effacement before the difficulties of his art, and never resting till he had obtained entire mastery over them and penetrated their innermost secrets.

It is not without positive pain that, by way of contrast to such work -by way of contrasting the methods of one man of genius with those of another—I find it necessary to refer to a report which is extensively current that there are at this moment in course of publication in

London under the name of 'proof etchings,' and subscribed for as such to the amount of some thousands of pounds, things that are not only not etchings at all, but really nothing more than copies of pen-and-ink drawings by the photographic process known as photogravure-the negatives being touched upon here and there with the etching needle to give them the appearance of etchings. Bound as I am not altogether to ignore a report so subversive of the art we practise, I yet make this reference to it not without a lingering hope, either that the report in question may not be true, or that the photographs now being sold as 'proof etchings' may be either withdrawn from the art market, or, at all events, sold for what they really are. Meanwhile, as a measure of protection to persons likely to be deceived by them, perhaps the best thing I can do will be to describe in detail the difference between the two things-between a real etching, that is, and one of those things which I fear I must call a 'margarine' substitute for an etching. The difference between them is that while one-the 'margarine etching '-is essentially flat, so that the finger passed over the surface of the impression fails to detect the presence of anything like a line in relief, in the other-the true etching-it finds the surface in very sensible relief. Let me try to explain this. That which is popularly called an impression' from an etched plate is, properly speaking, not an impression at all, but a cast' of the surface of that plate. The paper being reduced to little better than a coherent pulp by repeated spongings, and passed, face downwards on the plate, under the press, is forced into every bitten line upon its surface and thus takes a cast of it; so that if you take a true 'proof etching' into your hand and examine it, you at once both see and feel this relief, and, on turning the paper over, find a corresponding depression on the back of it. In the 'margarine etching 'both the back and the front of the paper are smooth. A great deal of the beauty and spirit of a proof etching— a beauty and spirit which rapidly disappear in the worn, or what is called the 'print' state, of the plate depend, in fact, on the retention in all its integrity of this line in relief; because every line so raised casts a shadow, and it is on the presence of this shadow that the artistic and commercial value-the 'bloom' in short-of a 'proof' depend. I doubt if this is generally known; the old printer, however, must have known it, since we see him taking care to preserve it by drying his proofs face uppermost on a string stretched from wall to wall, in the well-known illustration of an old printing house by Abraham Bosse. The modern printer, knowing nothing about it, obliterates it by piling one wet proof upon another. The best way of seeing this shadow, however, is to make a cast of an etched plate, not with paper and printer's ink but with plaster of Paris, and then inclining it at such an angle towards the source of light as that every line in relief may cast a shadow deeper, and therefore more apparent,

than the white raised line of the cast itself. I have often been amused at the perplexity of some of my young etching friends, unaware of these facts, to decide which was the better of two proofs fresh from the press, and which they had laid side by side to determine the point. First, they would find the proof on the left the best; then, changing the place of the two, the one which was before on the right the best; the difference depending, of course, on the angle at which the light struck the plate, and cast the shadow before mentioned. Here, then, I repeat, is an infallible sign by which any commonly intelligent person may know a true proof etching from a photographic copy of one.

There is one other subject which deserves the attention of every honest etcher, for it is one which concerns not only his own material interests, but the interests of his art and the interests of the public. I refer, and have done so before, to the subject of publication and to the absolute necessity which exists for a more advantageous outlet for his work than the present state of the print trade affords him. I have heard of a printseller coming into our gallery, and, without looking at anything within a distance of twenty feet, walking out again, declaring that he saw nothing there that he could sell,' the meaning of which was, that, seeing no great things that he could ask and get ten or twelve guineas for, it was not worth his while even to look at the smaller and far more precious work that he could, if he liked, buy, and therefore sell, at a guinea or two. This has been one of our drawbacks from the first, and it is a very serious one, because it signifies a complete sacrifice of the art side to the commercial side; of the artist to the tradesman; and of the public, who, if they were but allowed to do so, would be only too glad to get a refined thing at a moderate cost. The evil began in this way; no sooner had we succeeded in interesting the outer world in the revival of' etching,' and in thus popularising the term, than the shop windows became filled by huge sheets of paper which, except that the etching process had been expended upon them, were neither original nor, in any legitimate sense, etchings at all. It is on these things that the popular taste has been educated. The bigger the thing, the better and the greater the price asked for it. It has taken us years to expose this error, and to show that it is quality not quantity which makes a 'work of art.' Everything, however, comes to him who knows how to wait, and nothing would surprise me less, especially after our exhibition of this year, if the present fashion were to change, and if the printseller himself, by the greater number of customers he would attract, were the first to profit by the change. We shall see.

FRANCIS SEYMOUR HADEN.

THE WARFARE OF THE FUTURE.

Ar first sight the proposition may appear startling and indeed absurd; yet hard facts, I venture to believe, will enforce the conviction on unprejudiced minds that the warfare of the present when contrasted with the warfare of the past is dilatory, ineffective, and inconclusive.

Present, or contemporary warfare may be taken to date from the general adoption of rifled firearms; the warfare of the past may fairly be limited, for purposes of comparison or contrast, to the smooth-bore era; indeed, for those purposes there is no need to go outside the present century. Roughly speaking, the first five and a half decades of the century were smooth-bore decades; the three and a half later decades have been rifled decades, of which about two and a half decades constitute the breechloading period. Considering the extraordinary advances since the end of the smooth-bore era in everything tending to promote celerity and decisiveness in the result of campaigns-the revolution in swiftness of shooting and length of range of firearms, the development in the science of gunnery, the increased devotion to military study, the vast additions to the military strength of the nations, looking to the facilities for rapid conveyance of troops and transportation of supplies afforded by railways and steam watercarriage, to the intensified artillery fire that can now be brought to bear on fortresses, to the manifold advantages afforded by the electric telegraph, and to the crushing cost of warfare, urging vigorous exertions toward the speedy decision of campaigns-reviewing, I say, the thousand and one circumstances encouraging to short, sharp, and decisive action in contemporary warfare, it is a strange and bewildering fact that the wars of the smooth-bore era were, for the most part, shorter, sharper, and more decisive. Spite of inferiority of weapons, the battles of that period were bloodier, and it is a mathematically demonstrable proposition that the heavier the slaughter of combatants, the nearer must be the end of a war. There is no pursuit now after victory won, and the vanquished draws off shaken but not broken; in the smooth-bore era a vigorous pursuit scattered him to the four winds. When Wellington in the Peninsula wanted a fortress, and being in a hurry could not wait the result of a formal siege or a starvation blockade, he carried it by storm. No fortress is ever stormed now, no matter how urgent the need for its reduction, no

matter how obsolete its defences. The Germans in 1871 did attempt to carry by assault an outwork of Belfort, but failed utterly. It would almost seem that in the matter of forlorn hopes the Caucasian is played out.

Assertions are easy, but they go for little unless they can be proved; some examples, therefore, may be cited in support of the contentions advanced above. The Prussians are proud, and with justice, of what is known as the 'Seven Weeks War,' although as a matter of fact the contest with Austria did not last so long, for Prince Frederick Charles crossed the Bohemian frontier on the 23rd of June, and the armistice which ended hostilities was signed at Nikolsburg on the 22nd of July. The Prussian armies were stronger than their opponents by more than one-fourth, and they were armed with the needlegun against the Austrian muzzle-loading rifle. When the armistice was signed, the Prussians lay on the Marchfeld within dim sight of the Stephanien-Thurm, it is true, but with the strong and strongly armed and held lines of Florisdorf, the Danube, and the army of the Archduke Albrecht between them and the Austrian capital. On the 9th of October, 1806, Napoleon crossed the Saale. On the 14th at Jena he smashed Hohenlohe's Prussian army, the contending hosts being about equal strength; on the same day Davoust at Auerstadt with 27,000 men routed Brunswick's command over 50,000 strong. On the 25th of October Napoleon entered Berlin, the war virtually over and all Prussia at his feet with the exception of a few fortresses, the last of which fell on the 8th of November. Which was the swifter, the more brilliant, and the more decisivethe campaign of 1866, or the campaign of 1806 ?

The Franco-German war is generally regarded as an exceptionally effective performance on the part of the Germans. The first German force entered France on the 4th of August, 1870. Paris was invested on the 21st of September, the German armies having fought five great battles and several serious actions between the frontier and the French capital. An armistice which was not conclusive, since it allowed the siege of Belfort to proceed and Bourbaki's army to be free to attempt raising it, was signed at Versailles on the 28th of January, 1871, but the actual conclusion of hostilities dates from the 16th of February, the day on which Belfort surrendered. The Franco-German war, therefore, lasted six and a half months. The Germans were in full preparedness, except that their rifle was inferior to the French chassepot; they were in overwhelmingly superior numerical strength in every encounter save one with French regular troops, and they had on their banners the prestige of Sadowa. Their adversaries were utterly unready for a great struggle; the French army was in a wretched state in every sense of the word; indeed, after Sedan there remained hardly any regulars able to take the field. In August 1805 Napoleon's Grande