=A Renaissance.=--The Renaissance of wood engraving in England may be dated from 1775, when Bewick engraved a picture entitled "The Hound," and received a prize offered by the Royal Society for the best engraving on wood. Thomas Bewick was born in 1753, and fourteen years later he was apprenticed to a metal engraver. It was indeed a fortuitous circumstance which caused him to transfer his energies and his talents to wood engraving, in which he displayed a rare skill and inimitable directness of expression. He was probably the first wood engraver to adopt level tinting in place of complicated and laborious cross hatching which was then practised by his continental contemporaries. He usually preferred to develop his drawing rather than attempt the production of extraneous effects, and the subtle effectiveness of his pictures affords incontrovertible proofs of the advantage of such substitution. Their humour and pathos, vigour and fidelity, remain to this day as memorials of the consummate, artistic skill and perceptive capacity of a truly remarkable man. Bewick was a self-contained genius whose rugged emotions would admit of but one form of pictorial expression, and that peculiarly his own. His work was pregnant with masterly good sense, and ever manifested a charming simplicity of purpose. He had but a modest estimate of his ability as an engraver, and consequently rarely engraved any other than his own drawings. The exact measure of Bewick's influence on the art of wood engraving for pictorial illustration and reproduction would be difficult to satisfactorily determine. This much is certain, however, that through it wood engraving was verified and popularised, and illustrated literature received a stimulus which subsequent developments combined to maintain and emphasise. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--Old Wood Engraving (Erenburg Castle). "Colour values and perspective can only be expressed by thick and thin lines at varying distances apart." _Block supplied by the London Electrotype Agency Ltd., from the "Illustrated London News."_] =A Comparison.=--There is a vast difference between the effects procurable in an impression from a wood engraving and the print from an engraved metal plate. In the former, colour values and perspective can only be expressed by thick and thin lines at varying distances apart, the ink on the prints being of the same density throughout, no matter how thick or thin the lines may be. In metal engraving intermediary values may be obtained by lines of the same thickness, if need be, but of varying depth. The result is a strong, intense effect produced by the greater body of pigment held by such portions of the lines as are cut deeply, and the comparatively grey appearance of the shallower parts. It is largely due to this that prints from engraved metal plates possess a peculiar richness and depth of tone.