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Show wide latitude of expression and interpretative power, commend it as one of the noblest of the graphic arts ... To one who learns the song of the line upon a copper plate, a new world· is opened." Salaman, in his Old Engravers of England1 beautifully argues for the hobby: "There is a charm about old prints quite apart from their quality as engravings. They are links of intimacy with by-gone times. The printed page may stir us with vivid passages of history, or quicken our imagination with the social sidelight, or the contemporary gossip of personal or fashionable import, but the prints of the period bring us at once eye to eye with the people themselves. So we may see what they actually saw, the very faces and persons of their contemporaries, the costumes they wore, the attitudes they affected. So we may judge the taste of their 16 I day in the pictures that responded to it, and in the scenic aspect of their favorite plays. In a word, the old prints revive for us the human atmosphere of a past age." An art that could make its appeal to the grave and somewhat austere Charles Sumner in his days of physical weakness must have some merit. "A good engraving," says he, "is an undoubted work of art, but this cannot be said of many pictures, which, like Peter Pindar's razors, seem made to sell." An old edition of Aesop, printed in London in r6sr, thus voices the sentiment of the print collector: Examples are best precepts,· and a tale Adorn1d with sculpture better may prevail To make men lesser beasts, than all the store Of tedious volumes, vext the world before. Speaking of the joys of an evening spent with a collector of prints, Iowa's poet, Arthur Davison Ficke, 17 |