The rude methods of ancient artists can be distinctly traced through Egyptian, Assyrian, and Grecian history. Hieroglyphic and symbolic figures, engraved on ancient Egyptian monuments, bear testimony to a vast progress both in expressive and inventive power. Assyrian antiquities disclose an art which is even more suggestive and picturesque, while the ancient Greeks developed the highest qualities of pictorial power, and raised the art to a marvellous pitch of excellence. Beyond this brief epitome of the early history of engraving we need not venture. The idea of taking impressions from any form of incised drawings was not suggested until many centuries later. CHAPTER II _WOOD ENGRAVING_--RISE AND PROGRESS--BLOCK BOOKS--DURER'S INFLUENCE--HANS HOLBEIN--A RENAISSANCE--COMPARISON AND JUSTIFICATION--THE ILLUSTRATOR "It is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive. It is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair."--Emerson. =Wood Engraving.=--The most animating event in the whole history of engraving was the development of engraved wood blocks. Wood engraving did not receive the impetus of a new discovery as did metal engraving at a later period. It was to some extent a purely commercial enterprise, the success of which was assured by an ever increasing interest in pictorial art. Engraved wood blocks were used for purposes of reproduction several centuries before their introduction into Europe. Historians claim that it can be traced back to A.D. 930, when a form of playing card was known to the Chinese, and printed by them from rough wood engravings. The commercial intercourse of the Venetians with Eastern nations would suggest a probability that their navigators brought home some of these playing cards, and described the method of their production to their countrymen. The further we pursue our investigations, the more remarkable does this tardy recognition of the utility of wood engraving appear to be. It is true that somewhere about the middle of the thirteenth century legal documents were stamped, and merchant marks made with engraved wood blocks, but no extensive use was made of this method of reproduction until a much later period. The Low Countries claim credit for the first employment of engraved wood blocks for commercial purposes. Many dispute this claim, but the amount of credit at stake is so infinitesimal that it renders the contention of little value. Until the time of that immense progress which wood engraving made in Germany about the middle and towards the end of the fifteenth century, no work of any artistic merit whatever had been produced. The older prints may possess a certain historical or antiquarian value, but otherwise are both crude and uninteresting.