Excerpt from Etchings<br><br>What then has my own business, as I conceive it, been, throughout the bulk of this volume? It has been to make my narration - historical and biographical, critical and descriptive - preserve, as far as one mind can pre serve, a just balance, a sense Of proportion: not to exalt the Old at the expense of the novel, or the novel at the expense of the Old, or the celebrity at the cost of the man of genius who has not reached fame. A hundred Etchers, perhaps, may be named here; and I suppose about half of them - personalities Of mark - are studied pretty closely. It is personalities that are interesting. And therefore never a great believer in the dominating influence Of School, period, or nationality, in Art, whose value and whose charm lies in individual gift and individual utter ance - I have asked myself what was the contribution of each personality to the common stock, and on that contribution my attention has been concentrated.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.