It is said that as a boy this great man was employed as a laborer at his father’s coal-pit; but this may be dismissed as improbable at least, since he was early sent to school by his father at the Parsonage House of Ovingham, in an adjoining parish, and was subsequently, in compliance with his own desire, apprenticed to Mr. Beilly, an engraver at Newcastle, where, having by a mere accident of the office been employed to cut some mathematical diagrams on wood, he acquired a taste for the art sufficient to urge him on, without much encouragement, to its prosecution. Shortly after the expiration of his apprenticeship, he returned to his father’s house, and there applied himself earnestly to the study of the art in which he was ultimately to gain so much renown. [Illustration] In 1775, when he was twenty-two years old, he received a premium from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures for a cut of “the Huntsman and the Old Hound,” which was first printed in an edition of Gay’s Fables, published by T. Saint, Newcastle, 1779--a fac-simile of which is given below. [Illustration] Although this juvenile engraving of the great master in no respect approaches the greatest, or even the average, of his mature works, it yet exhibits great talent and greater promise. The whole later tendency of wood-engraving, such as it was, had been toward conventional method, not toward the study and imitation of nature; and here at once, in his earliest success, we find the learner leaving all rules and precepts behind him, and dashing at once into the bold, free, and irregular imitations of nature, by which he was thereafter to achieve a reputation, create a school, and redeem a noble art from the disrepute into which it had fallen; not--as some foolishly have asserted--to revive a lost or forgotten art; for wood-cutting never had been, even in the worst times, _disused_, but only degraded from its high estate and abused to base purposes.