but valued it rather as a means of complicated and delicate ornament, so that excessive attention was given to form divorced from meaning, and, as always happens in such a case, artificiality resulted. The wood-engravers attempted to satisfy this taste by seeking the refinement which copperplate-engraving obtained with greater ease and success, and they failed in the effort; in other words, wood-engraving yielded to copperplate-engraving because the taste of the age forced it to abandon its own province, and to contend with its rival on ground where its peculiar powers were ineffective. Here the history of wood-engraving in the old manner, as a means of reproducing pen-and-ink sketches in fac-simile, came to an end. It has been seen how valuable it had proved both as an agent of civilization and as a mode of art; how serviceable it had been in the popularization of literature and of art, and what influence it had exerted in the practical questions of the day as a weapon of satire; how faithfully it had reflected the characteristics of successive periods of civilization, and how perfectly, in response to the touch of the artist, it had embodied his imagination and expressed his thought. It had run a great career; its career seemed to have closed; but, when at the end of the eighteenth century the movement toward the civilization of the people again began with vigor and spirit, a new life was opened to it, because it is essentially a democratic art--a career in which it has already reached a scope of influence that makes its usefulness far greater than in the earlier time, and has given promise of a degree of excellence which, though in design it may not equal Holbein’s power, may yet result in valuable artistic work. VIII. _MODERN WOOD-ENGRAVING._ [Illustration: T FIG. 60.--From the “Comedia di Danthe.” Venice, 1536.]