168 



THE BOX. 



Indians were accustomed to print on paper, cotton, | 

 and silk (though it does not appear that they had ^ 

 carried the art to such perfection as to delineate 

 figures), long before the custom was practised in 

 Europe. In the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 

 turies, when writing was an accomplishment con- 

 fined to the learned, a wooden stamp was used in 

 the place of a sign -manual for at- 

 testing wTitten documents; and in 

 the fifteenth century, or perhaps 

 earlier, the art was applied to 

 stamping figures on playing-cards. 

 If the earliest cards bore designs 

 at all resembling the grotesque 

 figures on modern specimens, wood engraving was 

 as yet very far from having any pretension to be 

 considered one of the fine arts, or in the least 

 degree connected with them. Most probably the 

 latter are exact copies, for so utterly unnatural 

 are the kings and queens depicted on them, that 

 it is scarcely possible they can be anything else 

 than traditional absurdities.* A modern playing- 

 card may therefore be considered as aff'ording a 

 fair specimen of the perfection of w^ood-engraving 

 in the fifteenth century. The next step in advance 

 was the delineation of figures of the Saints, on 

 which account the art received the patronage of 

 the Church. The oldest wood-cut of which there 

 is any authentic record, is one of St. Christopher 

 carrying an infant Saviour through the water, and 



* A similar instance of obstinate adherence to an old, and there- 

 fore familiar, pattern, a long way behind the existing state of the 

 Arts, may be observed in the never-ending "willow pattern" on., 

 earthenware. 



