It has been supposed that most of the wood-cuts which appear in books printed by Caxton and De Worde were executed abroad; on the presumption that there were at that period no professed wood engravers in England. Although I am inclined to believe that within the fifteenth century there were no persons in this country who practised wood engraving as a distinct profession, yet it by no means follows from such an admission that Caxton’s and De Worde’s cuts must have been engraved by foreign artists. The manner in which they are executed is so coarse that they might be cut by any person who could handle a graver. Looking at them merely as specimens of wood engraving, they are not generally superior to the practice-blocks cut by a modern wood-engraver’s apprentice within the first month of his noviciate. I conceive that there would be no greater difficulty in finding a person capable of engraving them than there would be in finding the pieces of wood on which they were to be executed. Persons who have noticed the embellishments in manuscripts, the carving, the monuments, and the stained glass in churches, executed in England about the time of Caxton, will scarcely suppose that there were no artists in this country capable of making the designs for those cuts. There is in fact reason to believe that in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the walls of apartments, more especially in taverns and hostelries, frequently contained paintings, most probably in distemper, of subjects both from sacred and general history. That paintings of sacred subjects were not unusual in churches at those periods is well known. In most of the cuts which are to be found in books printed by Caxton, the effect is produced by the simplest means. The outline of the figures is coarse and hard, and the shades and folds of the draperies are indicated by short parallel lines. Cross-hatchings occur in none of them, though in one or two I have noticed a few angular dots picked out of the black part of a cut in order that it might not appear like a mere blot. The foliage of the trees is generally represented in a manner similar to those in the background of the cut of the knight, of which a copy is given at page 193. The oak leaves in a wood-cut[IV-42] at the commencement of the preface to the Golden Legend, 1483, are an exception to the general style of Caxton’s foliage; and represent what they are intended for with tolerable accuracy. Having thus noticed some of the earliest books with wood-engravings printed in England, I shall now resume my account of the progress of the art on the Continent. [Footnote IV-42: A copy of this cut is given at p. 186, vol. i. of Dr. Dibdin’s edition of the Typographical Antiquities.]