The pictorial illustration in black and white was due to the development of copper-plate first, and steel engraving afterwards, as new methods for book illustration. These processes were developed very much in Italy and France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in England their use in book illustration might be said to extend from about the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the present century. This period embraced that of the publication of a type of English books of essays, poems, and short stories, known as Anniversaries, Amulets, Annuals, Keepsakes, Souvenirs, &c. These books were filled with beautifully executed line engravings of landscapes and figure subjects, and most of them were of the highest order of technical skill. The period of their existence was from 1780 to 1830. Book decoration had become more and more pictorial and less decorative when the method employed was line engraving, for, generally speaking, pictures in oil or water-colour were copied with great fidelity and skill by the engraver for use in book illustration, and thus through the agency of the burin or engraver’s tool the painter supplanted the book decorator. Many of the line engravings in the books of the above period show a mixture, on the same plate, of pure line engraving and etching, the latter being a process in which the lines of the design are scratched into the metal plate, which had been previously covered with a wax preparation, and the lines thus exposed are bitten deeper by an acid solution into which the plate is immersed. Three artists of great talents—Prout, Stothard, and Turner—supplied designs and water-colour drawings of landscapes, figures, and decorative compositions, that were engraved as book illustrations. The illustrations, though on a small scale, to Rogers’s “Poems,” were very beautifully engraved by William Finden, after the designs of Stothard, who made the figure compositions, and of Turner, who did the landscapes. Finden was the great interpreter of Stothard’s figure designs, but was equally successful in his engraving of Turner’s landscapes. Stothard has designed many illustrations for books which are characterized by a fine sense of decorative value; his figures were, as a rule, clothed in light classical costumes, and were graceful in pose and in drawing. The best engravers of the day, such as Finden, Heath, Allen, Fox, Goodyear, Robinson, and Humphreys, were engaged for the publishers in translating his designs for book illustration.