Of course the older method has not ceased to be practised; artists have drawn upon the block, and their lines have been reproduced; sometimes a part of the lines are thus drawn, particularly the leading lines, and the minor portions of the sketch have been indicated by the designer by washes and left to be rendered by the engraver in his own lines. Old or modern wood-engraving as a mode of reproducing designs in fac-simile is valuable, but none of the artistic merit they may possess is due to the engraver; while the artistic merit shown in the new style of wood-engraving, as an art of design in white line, belongs wholly to the engraver. It results from this that white line is the peculiar province of wood-engraving, considered as an art; but that does not exclude it from being practised in its old manner as a mode of copying and multiplying ordinary design which it is able to reproduce. Thomas Bewick, the founder of the modern art, was born near Newcastle in 1753. He passed his boyhood in rude country life and received scanty schooling. At fourteen he was bound apprentice to the Newcastle engraver, Ralph Beilby; nine years later he went to seek his fortune in London, where he impatiently endured city life for less than a year; in the summer of 1777 he returned to his old master, with whom he went into partnership. Some preliminary training in book-illustration of the rude sort then in vogue was necessary to reveal his powers to himself; he received a premium from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, which had shown some interest in wood-engraving; and after farther minor work he began, in 1785, to engrave the first block for his British Quadrupeds, which, with his British Birds, although his other cuts are numbered by thousands, is the principal monument of his genius. When he took the graver in his hand he found the art extinct as a fine art; at most only large coarse prints were manufactured. Besides his great service to the art in introducing the white line he substituted boxwood for the pear or other soft wood of the earlier blocks, and he engraved across the grain instead of with it, or “the plank way of the wood,” as he called it; he also began the practice of lowering the surface of the block in places where less color was desired, so that less pressure would come upon those parts in printing (a device which Aldegrever is believed to have resorted to in some of his works), and he used the dabber instead of the inking-roller. [Illustration: Fig. 61.--The Peacock. From Bewick’s “British Birds.”] [Illustration: FIG. 62.--The Frightened Mother. From Bewick’s “British Quadrupeds.”] [Illustration: FIG. 63.--The Solitary Cormorant. From Bewick’s “British Birds.”] [Illustration: FIG. 64.--The Snow Cottage.] [Illustration: FIG. 65.--Birth-place of Bewick. His last vignette, portraying his own funeral.]