It appears, however, that the publisher was thwarted by bad printing. The printers of Didot or Mame, much as they consecrated all their care to it, did not yet know perfect workmanship; they put the most intense blacks into fine sheets. The great publishers trusted that better days would leave to more clever men the task of perfecting the invention. [Illustration: Fig. 92.--Portrait of Thomas Bewick.] Wood engraving owes its revival and almost perfection in England to Thomas Bewick, who published his first work in 1770, his "General History of Quadrupeds" 1790, and his "Birds" 1797. In these works he not only depicted his subjects with the most scrupulous fidelity, but in the tailpieces of the several chapters he drew the most quaint, humorous, and faithful representations of country life. He, with his brother, John Bewick, and their pupils, among whom was Luke Clennell, had an influence upon English art and the decoration of the Book in England which exists to our day. Not alone with us, for he may be said to have repaid the debt which we owed to France for her illustrated books of the eighteenth century by stimulating the art of wood engraving, which was practised by Tony Johannot and the other illustrators of the nineteenth century. To return to the eighteenth century, with which this chapter is specially occupied, we have said that the Royal Printing House, after various fortunes, still existed; and in 1788 it worked, for better or for worse, at the Louvre. According to the budget of that year, it cost the King 90,000 livres, of which the director had 1,400. There were, on the other hand, a certain number of official printing offices, that of war, for example, which was devoted entirely to the work of the Ministry. It was situated at Versailles, and was created in 1768. It is told of Louis XV. that, being one day in this workshop, he found a pair of spectacles, left as if in inadvertence on a printed sheet. As his sight was weakening, he took the spectacles and looked through them. The sheet was a hyperbolical eulogium composed, as if at random, by the director Bertier, in honour of the King. Louis XV., having read the dithyramb, replaced the spectacles, and quietly said, "They are too strong; they make objects too large." Who would believe that at the end of the century of Voltaire and Rousseau a craftsman would be found desirous of leading back the typographical art to its cradle, and of making xylographs again, under the name of polytypes? A German was the original who conceived the plan. He obtained an order of council for the establishment of his presses in 1785, but the same council suppressed them 1st November, 1787. His process was to substitute for movable characters a plate of fixed letters, and probably engraved.