LINE-ENGRAVING. That which is done with the burin, the only tool in C0111131011 use. The term "line-engraving' is almost wholly limited to such engraving as is intended for printing off upon paper. The burin is a slender steel bar, square, or more rarely triangular in section, with this peculiarity, that its working end is cut off iu the direction of the diagonal plane so that the most projecting point—that farthest from the handle—is a not very acute solid triangle bound ed by three planes, which meet in very sharp edges. This steel bar is set in a short wooden handle having a rounded form so shaped that the hand may push it strongly, point on. When this tool is forced along the surface of a metal plate with the axis of the steel bar slightly in clined to the surface of the plate, it Nits a groove, forcing out the metal in a curled shav ing: and according as it is forced in more or less deep it makes the incision more or less wide. The artist having before him, let us say, a patch of shade in the drawing which he is to copy, that patch having a definite size and the depth of the shade varying in an artistic gradation from light to dark, it is his business to reproduce that shade on the paper which is to be printed from his engraved plate by means of applied ink; and therefore, as he has at his disposal only solid black lines by which to represent shade. lie has to decide on the number. the direction, the fine ness, and the closeness of the setting of those lines.
Some burinists have worked with very fine lines, put in as simply as those of the etcher: short lines, nearly parallel, drawn with all the apparent ease of a pen and ink draughtsman. Others, especially the line-engravers of the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries, have used lines of varying breadth, very wide in some part of their length and tapering to a point. or nearly so:
and these lines have been used in one sy=;tem, nearly parallel to one another, and have also been used crossing each other like the cross hatching recommended by some teachers of draw ing in black and white. A still further develop ment of the process has involved the putting of a dot or cut in the metal in each lozenge-shaped space left by such cross-hatching; but this has not been approved by the critics of later times and may he thought to be abandoned. Line-en graving. has not been in very common use since the middle of the nineteenth century. and this, in part, because of the strong feeling caused by the use of etching and dry-point work by artists to render their own thoughts, with the result that line-engraving, a process much too slow and mechanical to please the artist who is ac customed to painting or drawing in monochrome. is neglected except for the reproduction of paint ings and the like. The very common use of line engraving to do just such work as that, namely, the close copying of pictures and statues in the public galleries of Europe, has aided in this gen eral condemnation of burin work as dull and un interesting. The production, since Iti5n, of a few works of the burin in which great artistic in telligence and much originality is shown has not sufficed to restore the popularity of the art. 1\loreover, the immense advance in photographic engraving of all sorts has helped in the coin abandonment of this with the other uses of the engraver's art.