bestowed upon him a pension of 300 ducats (about $600), in order that he might have it in his power to go to finish his studies at Rome. From this time the ecclesiastical capital became his chief residence. On his first arrival there, however, his novel principles of art revolted all the established authorities in such matters; and, for a long time, his works were the ridicule both of connoisseurs and of his brother sculptors. It was not till about the year 1800 that Canova's merits were fully and generally recognised. From this time, however, till his death in 1822, he stood, in universal estimation, without a rival, and received all the honours that the admiration of the world could bestow upon him, as one of the greatest sculptors that had appeared not only in his own, but in any age.

We will only mention farther, under this head, the name of THOMAS BEWICK, so deservedly celebrated for his admirable performances in wood-engraving; an art of which he may be said to have been not so much the improver as the reviver or reinventor. Bewick was born in the year 1753, at a village called Cherryburn, in Northumberland, England. From his earliest years he delighted above all things in observing the habits of animals; and it was his fondness for this study that gave rise, while he was yet a boy, to his first attempts in drawing. Long before he had received any instruction in that art, he used to delineate his favourites of the lower creation with great accuracy and spirit. Bewick, also, was in the habit of exercising his genius by covering the walls and doors of the houses in his native village with his sketches in chalk. Some of these performances one day chanced to attract the attention of a Mr. Bielby, a copperplate engraver, of Newcastle, as he was passing through Cherryburn; and he was so much struck, it is said, with the talent they displayed, that he immediately sought out the young artist, and obtained his father's con

sent to take him with him to be his apprentice. Mr. Bielby had not had his young pupil long under his charge, when the late Dr. Hutton, of Woolwich, happened to apply to him to furnish a set of copperplate engravings for a mathematical work (his Treatise on Navigation) which he was then preparing for the press. Bielby, however, who was a very intelligent man, suggested to the doctor that, instead of having his diagrams engraved on copper, in which case they could only be given on separate plates, to be stitched into the volume, it would be much better to have them cut in wood, when they might be printed along with the letter-press, each on the same page with the matter to which it referred to, or was intended to illustrate. This, indeed, is one of the chief advantages of wood engraving. In a copperplate, the parts which are intended to leave an impression upon the paper are cut into the copper, so that, after the ink is spread over the engraving, it has to be rubbed from all the prominent or uncut portion of the surface, in order that it may remain only in these hollows. Several disadvantages result from this. In the first place, the plate is very soon worn, or the fineness of the lines impaired by this continual abrasion to which it is subjected. Second

ly, from the method of inking being so different from that which is used in printing letter-press, where the parts of the type that make the impression are the prominences and not the hollows, and the ink, therefore, is allowed to remain where it naturally adheres on being applied by the ball or roller, the copperplate engraving must always be printed by itself, and generally on a separate page from the letter-press. The only way of giving both on the same page is to subject the paper to two successive impressions, which, besides the inconvenience of the operation, almost always produces an unpleasant effect from the difference of colour in the two inkings, and the difficulty of adjustment

A woodcut has none of these disadvantages. As the impression is to be made by the prominent parts of the wood, these, which receive the ink directly from the roller, are allowed to retain it, just as in the case of ordinary types; and there is therefore nothing of that process of rubbing at every impression, which so soon wears out a copperplate. The consequence is, that while rarely more than two thousand impressions can be taken from a copperengraving before it requires to be retouched, a woodcut will yield perhaps fifty thousand. Then the latter, from the manner in which it is to be inked, admits of being set up, if necessary, just like any of the other types, in the midst of a common page, and so of being printed both in the most convenient place and without any separate process. The block must, of course, for this purpose be made very exactly of the same thickness or depth as the other types along with which it is placed. In the early days of wood-engraving, the pear-tree or apple-tree was the wood most commonly used; but boxwood is now generally employed, as being of a still firmer and more compact grain. The surface of the block is first shaven very even and smooth; and upon this the figure is then traced in pencilling as it is to be finally cut out in relief.

Dr. Hutton followed Bielby's advice with regard to the diagrams for his book, and it was arranged that they should be cut in wood. Many of them, accordingly, were put by his master into young Bewick's hands. The boy executed them with so much accuracy, and a finish so greatly beyond what had usually been attained in that species of work, that Mr. Bielby earnestly advised him to give his chief attention henceforward to wood-engraving, and to make it his profession. At this time the art in question had fallen into the lowest repute. Yet it had by no means been always so. In former times it had both counted several distinguished names among

its cultivators and had reached a very striking degree of effect in some of its productions. About the end of the fifteenth century, the celebrated painter Albert Durer, who was also eminent as a copperplate engraver, practised cutting in wood. When the art was first introduced, it was employed to furnish ornamental borders for the title-pages of books; and these decorations were in general merely broad stripes of black, enlivened by a few simple figures, such as circles or hearts, which were left white upon the dark ground, by being, not raised, but scooped out in the wood. In the same manner, when any object, the shape of a human or of any other being, for instance, was to be represented, it was the practice merely to cut away the block according to the requisite outline, leaving all the space within untouched, so that when inked and applied to the paper, it left its impression in a blot of unrelieved and uniform blackness throughout. It soon, however, became usual to introduce white lines, effected, of course, by the easy process of merely cutting grooves in the wood, to mark the shades at the knees, shoulders, and other parts of the figure; and this improvement made the representation both less sombre and more natural. At a still later period, the outline alone and the shaded parts were left prominent. This may be considered to have been the commencement of the existing style of the art. But the period during which wood-engraving was carried to the greatest perfection, was about the beginning of the sixteenth century, when a method was followed by some of the more eminent artists, which gave to their performances an effect unattained by their predecessors, and which the best productions of succeeding times have perhaps scarcely surpassed. This was the method of cross-hatching, or the cutting of the wood into a congeries of squares or lozenges by two series of prominent lines running transversely to each other.

By this means they produced not only shading, but gradations of shading, with as much perfection as is done in copperplate engraving; for the different parts of the picture had only to be hatched more or less closely, according as they were intended to be dark or light. The difficulty, however, of carving these crossing lines upon the wood must have been exceedingly great; and, indeed, it has been supposed by some, that the effect in question was produced by the paper being impressed, not upon one, but upon two blocks successively. The method of cross-hatching in wood has, at all events, been long abandoned; but some attempts, that have been made in very recent times, have shown that it is perfectly practicable to produce the same effect as in the works of the old masters by a single block, although at the expense of extraordinary labour and skill. If the old method had consisted in any such halfmechanical process as the application of successive blocks, it probably would not have fallen so completely into oblivion. The extraordinary pains it cost and the time it consumed occasioned its disuse. When the practice of cross-hatching was abandoned, however, wood-engraving may be said to have ceased to be cultivated as an art. It was seldom resorted to except to furnish a few of the simple ornaments used in common printing, such as a border for the title-page, a tailpiece, or a coarse cut to put at the head of a street-ballad. From this state of contempt it was raised again to the rank of one of the fine arts, by the genius and perseverance of the individual, the mention of whose name has given occasion to this brief sketch of its history, and who, by his labours in its cultivation and improvement, raised himself also from obscurity_to distinction. According to Mr. Bielby's advice, Bewick probably continued to give much of his attention to cutting in wood during the remainder of his apprenticeship. As soon as it was over he repaired