During the decade 1875-1885, however, the main body of illustration was accomplished by wood-engraving, which a few years earlier had achieved such splendid results. Its artistic qualities were now at a rather low ebb, although good facsimile engravings of pen-drawings were not infrequent. The two great illustrated periodicals already referred to during that period relied more upon pictorial than journalistic work. An increasing tendency towards the illustration of the events of the day was certainly shown, but the whole purpose of the journal was not, as at present, subordinated thereto. The chief illustrated magazines of the time, _Harper's_, the _Century_, the _English Illustrated_, were also content with the older methods, and are filled with wood-engravings, in which, if the value of the simple line forming the chief quality of the earlier work has disappeared, a most astonishing delicacy and success were obtained in the reproduction of tone. Perhaps the most notable and most characteristic production of the time in England was colour-printing. The _Graphic_ and the _Illustrated London News_ published full-page supplements of high technical merit printed from wood-blocks in conjunction with metal plates, the latter sometimes having a relief aquatint surface which produced an effect of stipple upon the shading; metal was also used in preference to wood for the printing of certain colours. The children's books illustrated by Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway at this time are among the finest specimens of colour-printing yet seen outside of Japan; in them the use of flat masses of pleasant colour in connexion with a bold and simple outline was carried to a very high pitch of excellence. These plates were generally printed by Edmund Evans. In 1887 the use of process was becoming still more general; but its future was by no means adequately foreseen, and the blocks of this and the next few years are anything but satisfactory. This, it soon appeared, was due to inefficient printing on the one hand, and, on the other, to a want of recognition by artists of the special qualities of drawing most suitable for photographic reproduction. The publication of Quevedo's _Pablo de Segovia_ with illustrations by Daniel Vierge in 1882, although hardly noticed at the time, was to be a revelation of the possibilities of the new development; and a serious study of pen-drawing from this point of view was soon inaugurated by the issue of Joseph Pennell's _Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen_ in 1889, followed in by C. G. Harper's _English Pen Artists of To-day_ and in 1896 by Walter Crane's _Decorative Illustration of Books_. At this time also the influence of Aubrey Beardsley made itself strongly felt, not merely as a matter of style, but, by the use of simple line or mass of solid black, as an