the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you
well know, from the time of Albert Duerer down to Linton and engravers
of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the
use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood
itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some
painters--illustrators, if you please, in those early days--in fact,
made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light
and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with
suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or
left comparatively untouched.

It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the
different schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the
excellence of the line compared with the technic in the modern school
of engravers. By the modern school I mean the work of such men as
Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick, and others. I refer to them
that I may accent the stronger the medium which is the subject-matter
of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you who
propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be
tempted to make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express
your ideas and ideals.

But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting
for a moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this
marvellous change from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the
beginnings of an organization well known in New York, and perhaps to
many of you, as the Tile Club, to which organization I can
conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in
wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not
exist before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers,
for the club did not have the name of one among its membership, but as
containing a group of painters who for the first time in aid of the
art of wood-engraving in this country lent their names and brushes to
an illustrated magazine. Up to that time there had been a wide gulf
existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a painter. This
did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the
painters, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from
the fact that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty
to wander all over his canvas at will would bring himself down to
working through a magnifying-glass, a necess