early engravers. We have soft, damp paper, sticky ink, and a sudden flat pressure against a hard surface shielded with cloth, in opposition to fluid ink, dry paper, rubbing pressure and an elastic printing tool.
As we can find no positive knowledge of the method of printing which was adopted by the early printers of engravings on wood, it is somewhat hazardous to offer conjectures in place of facts. It is begging the question to assume that they were not printed by a press. The presswork of early prints is coarse and harsh, and could have been done with simple mechanism, with rude applications of the screw or of the lever, that could have been devised by any intelligent workman. It is more reasonable to assume that the early prints were made by a press, or with some practicable tool like a proof-planer, rather than with the impracticable frotton. One cannot resist the suspicion that the chronicler of early block printing who first described the frotton attempted to describe what he did not thoroughly understand—that he mistook the engraver's inking cushion for the tool by which he got the impression.
It should be noticed that all these old prints are of a religious character. Portraits of remarkable men or women, landscapes, representations of cities or buildings, caricatures, illustrations of history or mythology—none of these are to be found in any collection of the earliest prints. The early engravers were completely under the domination of religious ideas. Their prints seem to have been made with the permission, and possibly under the direction, of proper clerical authority. The designs are of much greater merit than any that could have been created by amateurs in the art of engraving on wood. They were, undoubtedly, copied from the illuminated books of piety which were then to be found in all large monasteries. Ecclesiastics of this period were careful of their books and jealous of their privileges, and not disposed to allow either to become cheap or common, but they must have favored an art that multiplied the images of
