of posthumous fame; whereas now, the
present generation know and hear a great deal
less about him than of Joseph Ady, or
Professor Blenkinsop.

I like the quaint legends—the little
anecdotical ana, attached to the inventions whose
origin we cannot always understand. I like
the story of the apple that fell on good Sir Isaac
Newton's hose; of Doctor Franklin and his
kite; of little Benjamin West inventing the
camera obscura, in his darkened bedroom,
when getting well of a fever, and little
dreaming—mild young Quaker—that somebody
else had invented it, two years before,
on the other side of the Atlantic, four
thousand miles away! Most of all do I
affect the traditional anecdotes relative to
painting and engraving. Touching the last, it
is curious that nearly all the legends
concerning it should be connected with that very
humble adjunct to domestic economy, the
wash-tub. A bundle of wet linen, thrown on
a steel cuirass, which had been engraved in
aniello, and on which a faint impression of
the pattern came off, was the germ of plate
engraving; the little radiculum, from which
the works of Woollet, and Landseer, and
Cousins were to spring. A hard day's wash,
souring the always somewhat acrid temper of
Dame Alice, wife of Master Albert Durer,
drove him for refuge to his wood-blocks, and
goaded him to the devising of that marvellous
art of cross-hatching, in wood engraving, as
lost and ignored, for centuries afterwards, as
the cunning trick of staining ruby glass, or
tempering poignard blades. And, lastly,
comes the legend of Aloys Senefelder's invention
of Lithography, which I will narrate
presently.

Senefelder was what some people call an
universal genius, and others, less respectfully,
a jack-of-all-trades. He could do a little
of everything, but not much of anything.
He could paint a little, and engrave a little,
and play the fiddle a little, and copy music,
and compose, and write poetry. He was not
lucky. He burned to publish; but publishers
would have none of his works: managers
refused his operas, connoisseurs looked coldly on
his pictures, singers declined to sing his songs,
or to listen to his fiddle-playing. Moreover,
the poor fellow found out that copperplates
were very expensive, that credit was difficult
to be obtained, that printing costs money, and
that paper was not to be had gratis. When
he found that he could not get printers to
bestow type-metal on his manuscripts, he
essayed to engrave them on copper, and to
have them struck off by a new species of
surface-printing. Reversing the process of
etching, where the design is eaten or corroded
into the plate, he proposed to write on the
copper with a peculiar composition of wax
and resin, which should withstand the action
of acid; then to corrode away the blank
portions of copper left untouched, and so leave
the letters written in relief. But he found
that it was exceedingly difficult to write
backwards, and more difficult still to correct
any errors; he burnt his fingers with
aquafortis, which persisted in biting the
plate in little pools or holes, instead of
lowering it equally; and, worst of all, the
mercenary coppersmith refused to let him
have any more plates, and poor Aloysius was
in despair. I have no doubt, moreover, that
Frau Senefelder, his mother, did not lead him
a very quiet life, but objected strongly against
"poking, and messing, and pottering with
nasty plates and things," and was frequently
moved to wrath by the holes burnt in her
blankets by aquafortis, and the spoiling of
her clean floors with melted wax and rosin,
and the lamp-blacking of her tablecloth, and
the abduction of her best worsted stockings
for plate-rubbers.

Now Aloys, not being able to procure any
new plates, bethought himself of the
expediency of rubbing the engraving off some of the
old ones, and polishing them up for fresh use. He
found, however, that most of the rotten stones
and emery he used for polishing were not
subtle enough; they were so coarse that they
made more scratches on the plate than they
removed. In this dilemma he called to mind
that there were stones found on the banks of
the river Isere, very soft, and very calcareous,
and thus suited to his purpose. He procured
some of these stones—first small pieces, then
larger ones; but found still that as his stock
of stone increased, his provision of copper
decreased in most lamentable disproportion.
It was all very well to have plenty of stone
powder to polish his plates with; but,
without plates to polish, the powder was
about as useful to him as the ruffles to
the man who had no shirt, or a gridiron to
the beefsteakless. He tried to etch subjects
on the stone itself, but aquafortis made
the stone effervesce, and refused to be bitten
to a sufficient depth to hold printing-ink.
Aloys was in despair. For awhile he
meditated the abandonment of his darling
printing theories, and of resuming the
study of jurisprudence; to which his father
had, previous to his death, devoted him.
But there were college fees to be paid at
the University of Ingoldstadt, whither he
was desirous of returning; and that
" perpetual want of pence, that vexeth public men,"
again stood in his way. In his extremity he
became positively desperate—infatuated,
insane enough to contemplate the possibility of
earning money by writing for the stage! A
comedy was the result of this madness. A
few weeks' dancing attendance, and airing
of his tendon Achillis about the Munich
theatres; a few insults from stage-door-
keepers, and rebuffs from candle-snuffers,
brought him to his senses, and convinced him
that the career of a dramatic author was one
leading to weeping and wailing and gnashing
of teeth. So he went home to his mother,
and lived for some time, how I know not—