Excerpt from An Outline of the Life and Works of Col. Paul Revere: With a Partial Catalogue of Silverware Bearing His Name

Jthe product of the shop. His abilities in the latter early led him to practice copperplate engraving, and it was through this channel that his influence on the political life of the time first began to be felt. Pictorial illustration for publication in those days was limited to a very few processes. Wood engraving had been highly developed by a few great masters, but as commonly practiced was very crude and unsatisfactory. Lithography was not yet invented, and so copperplate engraving, which we are now accustomed to associate with work of a more luxu rions sort, was the most available means of disseminating the caricatures and allegories that always have formed an essential part of an appeal to the judgment of the people. Today the execution and publication of such for a great news paper would be a matter of a very few hours; then the plates were slowly and laboriously wrought, and the prints as slowly made, but from the very rarity thus engendered came a corresponding importance, and to these embodiments of patriotic sentiment may be traced much of the enthusiasm for Colonial rights. The imposition and repeal of the detested Stamp Act were the subjects of some of his earliest efforts in this field, and they achieved an immediate popularity. Later his illustration of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770, when the British troops shot down Crispus Attucks and his companions on King (now State) street, proved a valuable document and memorial of that affair, and was even copied and issued in England. His early plates, as was to be expected from one wholly self-taught in the art, were crude in detail, though expressive and forceful in com position, but his later work often attained a considerable degree of elegance and artistic merit.

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