THE TECHNICS OF WOOD ENGRAVING. 299 



in any case, some half-dozen cuts, and in square crossings as 

 many as twenty, are required to clear one interstice. There- 

 fore if I carelessly draw six strokes with my pen across other 

 six, I produce twenty-five interstices, each of which will need 

 at least six perhaps twenty, careful touches of the burin to 

 clear out. Say ten for an average ; and I demand two hun- 

 dred and fifty exqusitely precise touches from my engraver, 

 to render ten careless ones of mine. 



97. Now I take up Punch, at his best. The whole of the 

 left side of John Bull's waistcoat the 



shadow on his knee-breeches and great- 

 coat the whole of the Lord Chancellor's 

 gown, and of John Bull's and Sir Peter 

 Teazle's complexions, are worked with fin- 

 ished precision of cross-hatching. These 

 have indeed some purpose in their texture ; 

 but in the most wanton and gratuitous way, 

 the wall below the window is cross-hatched 

 too, and that not with a double, but a treble line, Fig. 4. 



There are about thirty of these columns, with thirty-five in- 

 terstices each : approximately, 1,050 certainly not fewer 

 interstices to be deliberately cut clear, to get that two inches 

 square of shadow. 



Now calculate or think enough to feel the impossibility of 

 calculating the number of woodcuts used daily for our pop- 

 ular prints, and how many men are night and day cutting 

 1,050 square holes to the square inch, as the occupation of 

 their manly life. And Mrs. Beecher Stowe and the North 

 Americans fancy they have abolished slavery ! 



98. The workman cannot have even the consolation of 

 pride ; for his task, even in its finest accomplishment, is not 

 really difficult, only tedious. When you have once got into 

 the practice, it is as easy as lying. To cut regular holes with- 

 out a purpose is easy enough ; but to cut irregular holes with 

 a purpose, that is difficult, for ever ; no tricks of tool or 

 trade will give you power to do that. 



The supposed difficulty the thing which, at all events, it 

 takes time to learn, is to cut the interstices neat, and each 



