It is not sufficiently known that wood engraving, after the unfortunate attempts of Papillon in France, was restored in England by Thomas Bewick, who founded a school, of which, at the commencement of our century, Clennell and the brothers Thompson were members. One of the Thompsons went to France about the middle of the Restoration, doubtless with the hope of profiting by his art, and he offered to the Print Department of the National Library the diploma of the Highland Society, a large folio wood block, very adroit and very curiously cut, after the drawing of the celebrated Benjamin West, and copied from Clennell's original block of the same subject. M. Duchesne, then Keeper of the Prints, speaks of this last process as of an apparition: "This print makes apparent the long-neglected and often reappearing art of wood engraving, which, though it could never equal copper engraving, nevertheless merits the attention of amateurs when a capable hand is exercised upon it." It was, we see, a curiosity then, this relief cutting, of which the resurrection was to give an enormous impulse to the Book from the facilities of printing and the economies realised by the possibility of intercalation in periodicals. In fact, metal printing necessitated so much trouble, more for engraving than for the impression. With wood blocks surrounded by type the ordinary press sufficed. The _Magasin Pittoresque_, which was commenced in 1833, and the success of which from the first was very great, was born of these new combinations. Before it the _Messager Boiteux_ of Strasbourg and other popular almanacs progressed very well with their illustrations on wood. A kind of firm of engravers, at the head of which were Best and Andrew, undertook the illustrations of the _Magasin Pittoresque_. In a few years progress was immense, other publications came into existence, and a definitive return was made to the vignette in relief. The French illustrated paper preceded our _Illustrated London News_ by nine years. Lavish use was now made of wood engraving, which had thus been suddenly revived in the very midst of the new romantic effervescence, amid a war of books, which, in order to please, had above all to captivate the eye, reacting at once against the spirit and the art of the Restoration. Never before had artists to such an extent taken active part in a purely literary warfare. All the fantastic tendencies of young France were embodied in the lame and halting lines of the time and similar wretched doggerel. Doubtless the leaders of the school did not go quite so far, and their reputation even suffered from such theories; but, as always happens in such cases, the disciples outstripped their masters. [Illustration: Fig. 94.--Vignette by Devéria for the _Fiancé de la Tombe_.]