appeared in France in 1830, and this authority asserts that in England,
just before the invention of photographing on wood, some of the most
marvellous engravings appeared that have ever been done in the country.
"It is," he writes, "with the appearance of Frederick Sandys, Rossetti,
Walker, Pinwell, A. Boyd, Houghton, Small, du Maurier, Keene, Crane,
Leighton, Millais, and Tenniel, with the publication of the _Cornhill,
Once a Week, Good Words, The Shilling Magazine_, and such books as
Moxon's _Tennyson_ that the best period of English illustration
begins."

"The incessant output of illustration," he continues, "killed not only
the artists themselves, but the process. In its stead arose a better,
truer method, a more artistic method, which we are even now only
developing."

But there is another side to this question. Illustration has lost
something by the uniformity of style which the modern method encourages.
Keene, whose style was supposed to suffer most at the hands of the
engraver, found it more difficult than anyone to accommodate his free
methods to the rules that govern the results of the modern process.

It may be noted that it was about the time of the transition from
working on wood to work on paper that that slavery to the model began,
which, as we have pointed out, has not in the end been without an
unhappy effect in the loss of spontaneity to English Illustration.

[Illustration: Initial Letter from _The Cornhill_]

As for the art of wood engraving itself, we hope it will now have a
future like that which the arts of lithography and etching are enjoying.