16 PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1880

nevertheless, some of the plates came into effects both right and good for their purpose, and will, as I say, be always hereafter valuable.¹

§ 3. The copies of them, made for the second edition by Mr. Cuff, and here reprinted, are quite as good for all practical illustration, and much more admirable as pieces of careful and singular engraver’s skill. For the original method of etching was not easily imitated by straightforward engraving. When I use the needle-point directly on the steel, I never allow any burr or mystery of texture;-(see the plates by my own hand in Modern Painters;²-) but, in these architectural notes of shadow, I wanted mere spaces of gloom got easily; and so used a process shown me, (I think, by a German engraver-my memory fails me about it now³-) in which, the ground being laid very soft, a piece of tissue-paper is spread over it, on which one draws with a hard pencil-seeing, when the paper is lifted, approximately what one has got of shadow. The pressure of the point removes the wax which sticks to the tissue-paper, and leaves the surface of the plate in that degree open to the acid. The effect thus obtained is a kind of mixture of mezzotint-etching-and lithograph; and, except by such skill as Mr. Cuff possessed in a peculiar degree, not to be imitated in any other manner. The vignette frontispiece is also an excellent piece of work by Mr. Armytage, to whose skill the best illustrations of Modern Painters⁴ owe not only their extreme delicacy but their permanence. Some of his plates, which I am about to re-issue with portions of the book separately, arranged according to their subjects, show scarcely any loss of brightness for any use hitherto made of them.⁵

¹ [See above, Introduction, p. xlv.]

² [See List of Plates in Vols. VI. and VII.]

³ [The engraver was a young Frenchman. See below, p. 279.]

⁴ [See the author’s Preface to Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V).]

⁵ [Ruskin intended to issue selections from Modern Painters on mountains, clouds, and trees. Of those on mountains (“In montibus Sanctis”) two parts were issued in 1884-1885, on clouds (“Cśli Enarrant”) a single part in 1885, while of the third section none were published. The issued parts had, however, no plates. See further on this subject, Vol. III. pp. liii., 679.]

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