England was naturally the country where wood-engraving most flourished. The pupils of Bewick, particularly Charlton Nesbit and Luke Clennell, practised it with great merit, the former with a better knowledge of line-arrangement than Bewick, and the latter with extraordinary artistic feeling. The field, however, was not left wholly to those who had learned the art from Bewick. Robert Branston was, like Bewick, a self-taught wood-engraver; unlike Bewick, who was never trammelled by traditions, and was thus able to work out his own methods in his own way by the light of his own genius, Branston (Fig. 70), who had served an apprenticeship in engraving on copperplate, and had mastered the art of incising and arranging lines proper to that material, came to wood-engraving with all the traditions of copperplate-engraving firmly fixed in his mind and hand, and he founded a school which began where the art had left off at the time of its decline--in the imitation of the methods of engraving on copper. It is true that Branston sometimes admitted white line where he thought it would be effective, but he relied on black line for the most part. The wrong step thus taken led to the next. Engravers on copper began to draw designs on the block for wood-engravers to cut out. John Thurston, the most distinguished of these, drew thus for John Thompson, who, however, did not follow the lines with the servility of the engravers of the sixteenth century, but modified them as he engraved, changed the direction and character of the lines, and occasionally introduced white line. In the same way Clennell, who also engraved after John Thurston’s drawing, modified it, particularly in the disposal of the lights and shadows, and thus improved it by his own artistic powers. Merely in engraving simple lines Clennell’s artistic feeling placed him in a higher rank than even an engraver of the power of John Thompson, as may be seen in the cuts which these two men made after Stothard’s drawings in an edition of Rogers’s Poems (Fig. 71, 72); in this volume Clennell has given an effect which Thompson could not give. Branston’s engraving, in the same way, shows the craftsman’s skill and knowledge, but it lacks the artistic quality of the rival school of Nesbit and Clennell. The imitation of the manner of copperplate, which Branston introduced, became common, and was developed in the work of Orrin Smith and William Harvey, in which wood-engraving lost its distinctive virtues. This school, nevertheless, was popular, and its engravings were used to illustrate important works to which for a long time copperplate-engraving alone had been considered equal; thus wood-engraving once more encroached upon its rival’s ground. [Illustration: FIG. 71.--Vignette from “Rogers’s Poems.” London, 1827.] [Illustration: FIG. 72.--Vignette from “Rogers’s Poems.” London, 1827.]