THE TECHNICS OF WOOD ENGRAVING. 303 



the fable of the Frogs and the Stork.* He is, as I told you, 

 as stout a reformer as Holbein, or Botticelli, or Luther, or 

 Savonarola ; and, as an impartial reformer, hits right mid left, 

 at lower or upper classes, if he sees them wrong. Most fre- 

 quently, he strikes at vice without reference to class ; but in 

 this vignette he strikes definitely at the degradation of the viler 

 popular mind which is incapable of being governed, because 

 it cannot understand the nobleness of kingship. He has writ- 

 ten better than written, engraved, sure to suffer no slip of 

 type his legend under the drawing ; so that we know his 

 meaning : 



" Set them up with a king, indeed ! " 



106. There is an audience of seven frogs, listening to a 

 speaker, or croaker, in the middle ; and Bewick has set him- 

 self to show in all, but especially in the speaker, essential frog- 

 giness of mind the marsh temper. He could not have done 

 it half so well in painting as he has done by the abstraction of 

 wood-outline. The characteristic of a manly mind, or body, 

 is to be gentle in temper, and firm in constitution ; the con- 

 trary essence of a froggy mind and body is to be angular in 

 temper, and flabby in constitution. I have enlarged Bewick's 

 orator-frog for you, Plate I., c., and I think you will feel that 

 he is entirely expressed in those essential particulars. 



This being perfectly good woodcutting, notice especially its 

 deliberation. No gcrawling or scratching, or cross-hatching, 

 or 'free ' work of any sort. Most deliberate laying down of 

 solid lines and dots, of which you cannot change one. The 

 real difficulty of wood engraving is to cut every one of these 

 black lines or spaces of the exactly right shape, and not at all 

 to cross-hatch them cleanly. 



107. Next, examine the technical treatment of the pig, above. 

 I have purposely chosen this as an example of a white object 

 on dark ground, and the frog as a dark object on light ground, 

 to explain to you what I mean by saying that fine engraving 

 regards local colour, but not light and shade. You see both 

 frog and pig are absolutely without light and shade. The frog, 

 indeed, casts a shadow ; but his hind leg is as white as his 



* From Bewick's ^Esop's Fables. 



