Up to now we are willing to admit that only Germany is in a position to produce a piece of evidence beyond suspicion. With its imposing date of 1423, its time-honoured rights, and official renown, the "St. Christopher," now in the library of Lord Spencer, has privileges which cannot be disputed or questioned. But it does not follow that the wood-cuts of the "Speculum," of the "Biblia Pauperum," of the "Ars Moriendi," and of similar undated publications, must be more recent. Nor, because a dated German print has survived, must it therefore be concluded that nothing was produced at that time except in Germany. It should be particularly observed that the plates of the "Speculum" seem well-nigh prodigies of pictorial skill and knowledge in comparison with the "St. Christopher;" that their author must have served a long apprenticeship in a good school; that, in short, no art begins with such a piece of work, and that, even supposing these cuts did not appear till after the German print, some time had doubtless elapsed during which the progress they involve had been prepared and pursued. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that, from the first years of the fifteenth century, the engravers of the Low Countries began, under the influence of the Van Eycks, to be initiated into the conditions of art, and that, like their countrymen the printers, they showed the path which others were to clear and level. It must be remarked, however, that in the beginning printing and wood engraving do not always march on parallel lines--that they do not meet in like order their successive periods of trial and advance. In Germany, up till the time when Gutenberg attained the final stage, and popularised the last secrets of the printing process, painters, draughtsmen, and engravers were all helpless in a rut: from the author of the "St. Christopher" to the engravers of thirty years later, they boast but the roughest and coarsest of ideas and methods. Heinecken, the exaggerated champion of the German cause as against the partisans of Coster, whom he contemptuously calls "the beadle"[9]--Heinecken himself, speaking of the first German books engraved on wooden tablets, is obliged to admit that "when the drawing is examined with a connoisseur's eye, a heavy and barbarous taste appears to reign throughout."[10] In Germany the artistic part was to wait upon and follow the example of the industrial: was to lag behind and to plod on in barbarism long after the industrial revolution was accomplished at its side. And it was long before the "wood-cutting" engravers acquired anything like the skill of the printers employed by Gutenberg and by Füst.