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1. "Drawing may be said to possess a divine virtue in its creative power, and to be a perpetual miracle, as it preserves the images of distant objects, and the likeness of those we love. Without risking our lives on the boisterous ocean, we may enjoy at home, in a small book, representations of the finest productions of nature and art, though situated in the remotest regions of the world."

2. "One thing God loves is a collection of prints after the great masters, an enterprise most useful to the human race, which multiplies at little cost the merits of the best painters, which bestows immortality. . . on Beauties which would perish without the help of Engraving, and which can introduce all the schools of painting to a man who has never seen a picture."

Voltaire, The Temple of Taste

3. "There are now, I believe, as many Booksellers as there are Butchers & as many Printshops as of any other trade. We remember when a Print shop was a rare bird in London & I myself remember when I thought my pursuits of Art a kind of criminal dissipation & neglect of the main chance, which I hid my face for not being able to abandon as a Passion which is forbidden by Law & Religion, but now it appears to be Law & Gospel too . . ."

Blake, to Cumberland [1800]

4. "pictures of merit and value must ever be confined to the great and the opulent; nor are even copies of such works numerous or of easy acuisition. By the admirable invention of Engraving, in its various branches, imitations of the noblest productions of the pencil are brought within the reach of the individuals of very moderate fortune. By their size alone, independently of their many other excellencies, prints are rendered subservient to a number of valuable purposes, to which paintings are necessarily inapplicable."

5. "...the ideas of better and worse are generally attached to the terms original and copy, and this with good reason; not only because copies are usually made by inferior hands, but. . . our hands cannot reach what our minds have conceived; it is God alone whose works answer to his ideas. In making an original our ideas are taken from nature, which the works of art cannot equal; when we copy. . .we take our ideas. . . from. . . these defective works of art. . .: and these lower ideas, too, our hands fail of executing perfectly; an original is the echo of the voice of nature, a copy is the echo of that echo.≤

Richardson. Art of Criticism, 1719

6. ≥Every Man will Naturally, and Unavoidably mix Something of Himself in all he does if he Coppies with any degree of Liberty: If he attempts to follow his Original Servilely, and Exactly, That cannot but have a Stiffness which will easily distinguish what is so done from what is performed Naturally, Easily, and without Restraint.≤

Richardson, in Rogers Imitations of Old Master Drawings, 1771

7. "Of all the imitative arts, painting itself not excepted, engraving is the most applicable to general use . . . it has been called in, as an assistant in almost every branch of knowledge; and has . . . facilitated the means of communicating our ideas, by representing to the sight whatever is capable of visible imitation; and thereby preventing that circumlocution, which would ill explain, in the end, what is immediately conceived from the actual representation of the object."

Joseph Strutt, Biographical Dictionary of Engravers, 1785