THE BOX. 



173 



page with the types ; and only one impression is 

 required to print the letter-press and the cut 

 which is to illustrate it. Added to this, the fric- 

 tion (though produced simply by the soft fleshy 

 ball of the thumb) which is required to charge 

 the lines of a copper-plate engraving with ink, 

 soon wears away the sharpness of the lines, and 

 renders every new impression less perfect than 

 its predecessor. But in printing wood-cuts, the 

 whole of the pressure being vertical, there is no 

 perceptible wearing away of the block, so that 

 the goodness of the impression depends only on 

 the materials employed, and the care of the 

 printer.^ But even on the supposition that the 

 mechanical advantages of each were equal, the 

 preference must be awarded to w^ood-cuts for 

 the illustration of printed books, inasmuch as 

 there is a harmony produced in the page by the 

 engraving and letter-press being of the same colour, 

 which is very seldom the case when copper-plate 

 vignettes are introduced with letter-press. 



In spite however of all these advantages, the 

 art of engraving on wood declined, and was all 

 but lost, when it w^as revived in England by the 

 celebrated Thomas Bewick, an artist who not 

 only restored the taste for the art, but executed, 

 in the course of a long and industriously spent 

 life, numerous works, which his most zealous 



* In an interesting Memoir of Bewick, prefixed to the sixth 

 Yolume of Jardine's Naturalist's Library, it is stated, that, " many of 

 Bewick's blocks have printed upwards of 300,000 : the head-piece of 

 the Newcastle Courant above 1,000,000 ; and a small vignette for 

 a capital letter in the Newcastle Chronicle, during a period of twenty 

 years, at least 2,000,000.'' 



