Mechanical Processes of E EV AVINE. A4I 
-of a restless continual craving for other more congenial and 
fitting labour. It is well for them when they understand 
this natural desire, and appease it by devoting their hours 
of recreation to some more intellectual hobby; but it is ill 
for them, and for the community at large, when conscious 
only of the feverish restlessness of their intuitive discon- 
tent, the meaning of which they do not conceive, they seek 
relief in follies and vices from which spring more than half 
the evils of social life. It is idle minds, rather than idle 
hands, by which Satan contrives so much mischief shall be 
done and so much misery endured. 
It seems to me, on the other hand, that life has no truer 
enjoyment than is derived from labour we delight in. Its 
all-absorbing interest, its patience-begetting power, the 
eagerness with which we seek it, and the reluctance with 
which we quit it, all tell of that delight which has tenderly 
smoothed the roughest paths of care and poverty for many 
‘a poor earnest-hearted enthusiast, and enabled struggling 
genius to bear up bravely through hard up-hill fights, and 
win the grandest victory true ambition can desire. “The 
labour we delight in physics pain.” 
To which of these two classes of labourers are wood- 
engravers most nearly allied? and is their work ‘such as 
can be done best by machinery? These are the first ques- 
tions I wish to place before you, as introductory to a briefly 
descriptive notice of some attempts which have been made 
of late years to substitute a mechanical process for wood 
engraving. 
It is generally held that the wood-engraver should also 
be an artist, and our best engravers really are artists of 
genuine ability, fully understanding the nature and value 
of every line and tint in the best drawings entrusted to 
them. From their hands a bad or indifferent drawing 
emerges wonderfully improved, and a good one comes out 
uninjured. But I am inclined to believe that, of these two 
specimens, such an artist must find most delight in en- 
graving the bad drawing, for in that there is scope for some 
mental exercise, some opportunity for displaying artistic 
skill and judgment, for which, however, he will get no credit, 
whereas the other is, when done, merely an example of de- 
licate manipulation, such as should be best accomplished 
by machinery. There is, to my thinking, something humi- 
liating for an artist in tediously and laboriously cutting 
away, with the minute point of his graver, the hard surface 
of boxwood between thousands of finely drawn lines and 
