first years of the fifteenth century, or they may have been taken long afterward, in a spirit of curiosity or experiment. The existence of these early prints, however, undoubtedly from the workshops of the goldsmiths, and after a mode long practised by them, strengthens the hypothesis--suggested by their wide acquaintance with artistic processes and their exclusive possession of all the proper instruments--that they originated the art of taking impressions on paper from engraved work; at all events, this seems the least wild, the most consistent, and best supported conjecture which has been put forth. There is, however, no lack of more specific accounts of the origin of wood-engraving. Pliny’s[11] reference to the portraits with which Varro illustrated his works indicates, in the opinion of some writers, a momentary, isolated, and premature appearance of the art in his day. Ottley[12] maintains that the art was introduced into Europe by the Venetians, who learned it “at a very early period of their intercourse with the people of Tartary, Thibet, and China;” but of this there is no satisfactory evidence. Papillon,[13] a French engraver of the last century, relates that in his youth he saw in the library of a retired Swiss officer nine woodcuts, illustrative of the deeds of Alexander the Great, executed with a small knife by “two young and amiable twins,” Isabella and Alexander Alberico Cunio, Knt., of Ravenna, in their seventeenth year, and dedicated by them to Pope Honorius IV., in 1284-85; but, as no one else ever saw or heard of them, and there is no contemporary reference to them, as no single unquestionable fact has been adduced in direct support of the story, and as Papillon is an untrustworthy writer, his tale, although accepted by some authorities,[14] is generally discredited,[15] and was regarded by Chatto[16] as the hallucination of a distempered mind. Meerman,[17] the stout defender of the claim of Lawrence Coster to the invention of printing with movable types, relying on the authority of Junius,[18] who wrote from tradition more than a century after the facts, makes Coster the first printer of woodcuts. Some writers accept this story; but in spite of them, and of the well-developed genealogical tree with which Meerman provided his hero, and even of Mr. Sotheby’s[19] supposed discovery of Coster’s portrait, his very existence is doubted. The charming scene in which the idea of the new art first occurred to Coster, as he was walking after dinner in his garden, and cutting letters from beech-tree bark with which to print moral sentences for his grandchildren--the old man surrounded by the childish group in the well-ordered Haarlem garden--is probably, after all, little more than a play of antiquarian fancy. These stories have slight historic weight; they are, to use M. Renouvier’s simile, “a group of legends about the cradle of modern art, like those recounted of ancient art, the history