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Excerpt from The Old Engravers of England: In Their Relation to Contemporary Life and Art, (1540-1800)
But to lovers of old times, who would eagerly turn from their intimate delights among the pages of Pepys and Evelyn, Lord Hervey and Horace Walpole, Mrs. Delany, Fanny Burney, Mrs. Montagu, or any of the old chroniclers, diarists or letter-writers, to visualise their impressions with the contemporary prints, to them I venture to hope my pages may serve a little for guidance.
There is a charm about old prints quite apart from their quality as engravings. They are links of intimacy with bygone times. The printed page may stir us with vivid passages of history, or quicken our imaginations 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 them selves. 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 day in the pictures that responded to it, and in the scenic aspect of their favourite plays. In a word, the old prints revive for us the human atmosphere of a past age.
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