However—­again I say—­my present business is with Prints.  Generally speaking, these prints are pleasing in their manner of execution, reasonable in price, and of endless variety.  But the perpetual intrusion of subjects of studied nudity is really at times quite disgusting.  It is surprising (as I think I before remarked to you) with what utter indifference and apathy, even females, of respectable appearance and dress, will be gazing upon these subjects; and now that the art of lithography is become fashionable, the print-shops of Paris will be deluged with an inundation of these odious representations, which threaten equally to debase the art and to corrupt morals.  This cheap and wholesale circulation of what is mischievous, and of really most miserable execution, is much to be deplored.  Even in the better part of art, lithography will have a pernicious effect.  Not only a well-educated and distinguished engraver will find, in the long run his business slackening from the reduced prices at which prints. are sold, but a bad taste will necessarily be the result:  for the generality of purchasers, not caring for comparative excellence in art, will be well pleased to give one franc, for what, before, they could not obtain under three or five.  Hence we may date the decline and downfall of art itself.  I was surprised, the other day, at hearing DENON talk so strongly in favour of lithography.  I told him “it was a bastard art; and I rejoiced, in common with every man of taste or feeling, that that art had not made its appearance before the publication of his work upon Egypt.”  It may do well for

  “The whisker’d pandour and the fierce hussar”—­

or it may, in the hands of such a clever artist as VERNET, be managed with good effect in representations of skirmishes of horse and foot—­groups of banditti—­a ruined battlement, or mouldering tower—­overhanging rocks—­ rushing torrents—­or umbrageous trees—­but, in the higher department of art, as connected with portrait and historical engraving, it cannot, I apprehend, attain to any marked excellence.[198] Portraits however—­of a particular description—­may be treated with tolerable success; but when you come to put lithographic engraving in opposition to that of line—­the latter will always and necessarily be

... velut inter ignes
LUNA minores!

I cannot take leave of A CITY, in which I have tarried so long, and with so much advantage to myself, without saying one word about the manners, customs, and little peculiarities of character of those with whom I have been recently associating.  Yet the national character is pretty nearly the same at Rouen and at Caen, as at Paris; except that you do not meet with those insults from the canaille which are but too frequent at these first-mentioned places.  Every body here is busy and active, yet very few. have any thing to do—­in the way of what an Englishman