The art of book-illustration in England has been of slow growth, and till recent times its development has been sporadic. This has depended largely on the mediums of reproduction which happened to be ready to the designer’s hand, although on occasion men of genius, such as Blake and Bewick, have found for themselves the means for their pictorial needs, and have incidentally enriched the method’s possibilities. English book-illustration can scarcely be said to have had any distinctive existence before the eighteenth century, although the earliest printed books had pictorial woodcuts upon their pages. These were of a more or less primitive character, and bore little illustrative relation to the literary text, being frequently of foreign origin and serving again and again for various books. The printers would seem to have used them without any definitely decorative or illustrative intention, and, as a matter of fact, in the England of Caxton’s day, and for some decades later, the graphic arts were not in a condition to offer much to the service of the new art of printing. Native design had little artistic significance, and English wood-engraving was still in the crudest state, even at a time when in Germany Dürer, Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach, and Holbein were using the woodcut for imperishable illustration--imperishable because of its intrinsic artistic qualities. When, in the middle of the sixteenth century, copper-plate engraving was belatedly introduced into this country it was soon employed to add to the attractiveness of the printed book. Indeed, it is in the books of the period that we must in a great measure trace the progress of the engraver’s art in England, though the illustrator’s was still largely to seek. Few books of any importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were published without an engraved title-page or frontispiece, or both, ornately designed, often with the author’s portrait set amid allegorical or symbolic suggestions of the book’s contents. Many of these pictorial title-pages and frontispieces have a quaint artistic charm, though their significance is for the most part literary and fantastic. Occasionally, as in the case of Elstrack’s ponderous frontispiece to Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World,” we find the author thinking it necessary to explain “The Minde of the Front,” but, as the engravers’ names only appeared on the plates, we must suppose them to have been also the designers, and so we may associate with the beginnings of book-illustration in this country the names of William Hole, John Payne, William Marshall, Robert Vaughan, and others of the early line-engravers. But illustration in any modern acceptance of the term was not to be found in the books of the seventeenth century, although occasionally among the pages would appear plates of a pictorial character.