wood-engravings of the weekly papers, for which the artist's drawing might come in on a Tuesday, to be cut up into little squares and worked on all night as well as all day, in the engravers' shops—it was unequivocally and deplorably, but hardly surprisingly, bad.

Upon this strange medley of the miraculously good and the excusably horrid came the invention of the process line-block, and the problem which had baffled so many fifteenth-century woodcutters, of how to preserve the beauty of simple outlines was solved at a single stroke. Have our modern artists made anything like adequate use of this excellent invention? My own answer would be that they have used it, skilfully enough, to save themselves trouble, but that its artistic possibilities have been allowed to remain almost unexplored. As for the trouble-saving—and trouble-saving is not only legitimate but commendable—the photographer's camera is the most obliging of craftsmen. Only leave your work fairly open and you may draw on as large a scale and with as coarse lines as you please, and the camera will photograph it down for you to the exact space the illustration has to fill and will win you undeserved credit for delicacy and fineness of touch as well. Thus to save trouble is well, but to produce beautiful work is better, and what use has been made of the fidelity with which beautiful and gracious line can now be reproduced? The caricaturists, it is true, have seen their opportunity. Cleverness could hardly be carried further than it is by Mr. Phil May, and a caricaturist of another sort, the late Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, degenerate and despicable as was almost every figure he drew, yet saw and used the possibilities which artists of happier temperament have neglected. With all the disadvantages under which they laboured in the reproduction of fine line the craftsmen of Venice and Florence essayed and achieved more than this. Witness the fine rendering into pure line of a picture by Gentile Bellini of a tall preacher preceded by his little crossbearer in the 'Doctrina' of Lorenzo Giustiniano printed at Venice in 1494, or again the impressiveness, surviving even its little touch of the grotesque, of this armed warrior kneeling at the feet of a pope, which I have unearthed from a favourite volume of Venetian chapbooks at the British Museum. A Florentine picture of Jacopone da Todi on his knees before a vision of the Blessed Virgin (from Bonacorsi's edition of his 'Laude,' 1490) gives another instance of what can be done by simple line in a different style. We have yet other examples in many of the illustrations to the famous romance, the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,' printed at Venice in 1499. Of similar cuts on a much smaller scale, a specimen will be given later. Here, lest anyone should despise these fifteenth-century efforts, I would once more recall the fact that at the time they were made the execution of such woodcuts required the greatest possible dexterity, in cutting away on each side so as to leave the line as the artist drew it with any semblance of its original grace. In many illustrated books which have come down to us what must have been beautiful designs have been completely spoilt, rendered even grotesque, by the fine curves of the drawing being translated into scratchy angularities. But draw he never so finely no artist nowadays need fear that his work will be made scratchy or angular by photographic process. It is only when he crowds lines together, from inability to work simply, that the process block aggravates his defects.

La Lega Facta Nouamente a Morte e Destructione de li Franzosi & suoí Seguaci.

VENICE. C. 1500.

FROM THE RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI UN MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI GESÙ, 1572. JAC. CHITI.

FROM THE RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. CRISTINA, 1555.

I pass on to another point as to which I think the Florentine woodcutters have something to teach us. If we put pictures into our books, why should not the pictures be framed? A hard single line round the edge of a woodcut is a poor set-off to it, often conflicting with the lines in the picture itself, and sometimes insufficiently emphatic as a frame to make us acquiesce in what seems a mere cutting away a portion from a larger whole. Our Florentine friends knew better. Here (pp. xiv-xv), for instance, are two scenes, from some unidentified romance, which in 1572 and 1555 respectively (by which time they must have been about fifty and sixty years old) appeared in Florentine religious chapbooks, with which they have nothing to do. The little borders are simple enough, but they are sufficiently heavy to carry off the blacks which the artist (according to what is the true method of woodcutting) has left in his picture, and we are much less inclined to grumble at the window being cut in two than we should be if the cut were made by a simple line instead of quite firmly and with determination by a frame.

FROM LORENZO DE' MEDICI'S LA NENCIA DA BARBERINO, S.A.

I have given these two Florentine cuts, much the worse for wear though they be, with peculiar pleasure, because I take them to be the exact equivalents of the pictures in our illustrated novels of the present day of which Miss Sketchley gives several examples in her third paper. They are good examples of what may be called the diffused characterization in which our modern illustrators excel. Every single figure is good and has its own individuality, but there is no attempt to illustrate a central character at a decisive moment. Decisive moments, it may be objected, do not occur (except for epicures) at polite dinner parties, or during the 'mauvais quart d'heure,' which might very well be the subject of our first picture. But it seems to me that modern illustrators often deliberately shun decisive moments, preferring to illustrate their characters in more ordinary moods, and perhaps the Florentines did this also. Where the illustrator is not a great artist the discretion is no doubt a wise one. What for instance could be more charming, more completely successful than this little picture of a messenger bringing a lady a flower, no doubt with a pleasing message with it? In our next cut the artist has been much more ambitious. Preceded by soldiers with their long spears, followed