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Updated: May 24, 2025
An eight-day clock ticked comfortably upon the wall, and on either side of it were two pictures, wood-cuts, eked out with rude splashes of red and blue by some primitive process of lithography: the one represented the "Take of a Right Whale in Behring's Sea by the Good Adventure Barque out of New Bedford;" the other, the "Landing of H. M. Troops in Boston, His Majesty's Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1766."
You can hardly imagine what a treasure I seemed to have found in a volume which contained several engravings the size of the page, besides many small wood-cuts scattered through the letter-press. I lost sight alike of fatigue and disappointment, as I pored over the pictures, and read bits here and there. "And such charming pictures there were!
We accordingly beg our readers to accompany us up a creaking pair of stairs to a small backroom on the first floor, furnished with an old, round oak table, with turned legs, four or five old-fashioned chairs, a few wood-cuts, daubed with green and yellow, representing the four seasons, a Christmas carol, together with that miracle of ingenuity, a reed in a bottle, which stood on the chimney-piece.
I was curiously accurate in my accounts of time, and knew to half-an-hour what was spent on this pursuit or that. Here is an extract in evidence of this tendency: "Thursday, August 13, 1853. Determined to-day to study the copper Albert Duerer 80 hours, having given 83 to the wood-cuts. I have already given the copper 101/2 hours, so that I have 691/2 to devote to it yet.
Bewick, by the way, who wrote his History of British Birds in 1797, presents in one of his inimitable "tailpiece" wood-cuts a prevision of the aeroplane. The picture shows the airman seated in a winged car, guiding with reins thirteen harnessed herons as the motive power, and mounting upwards, apparently very near the moon.
He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson Crusoe. In art, he greatly esteems Bewick's wood-cuts, and Waterloo's sylvan etchings. But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and gives his mind fair play.
About this time I began to try to draw, and especially birds and beautiful forms, though years before I had begun to color the wood-cuts in my books.
Hamerton was invited by the Society of Illustrators to accept a Vice-Presidency along with Sir J. E. Millais, Sir F. Seymour Haden, and Mr. Holman Hunt. Messrs. Scribner having planned a work on American wood-cuts, wrote to ascertain if my husband would undertake it. Mr. Burlingame's letter explains the scheme.
This portly octavo, with its four hundred and sixty-four wood-cuts, a seemingly exhaustive compend of the subject, may indeed be accepted as the peroratory rain destined to give the soil its last preparation for the rich growth to follow under a clear and sunny sky. What pen and print can do to perfect the requisite conditions for a Periclean age of pottery must by this time have been done.
So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not interesting."
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