When, in 1835, the time arrived for me to leave school, a certain aptitude I had shown for drawing led my father to think of educating me for an artist. But after I had spent a few months in copying from the flat and the round, and had attended some occasional Royal Academy lectures, wood-engraving was deemed a preferable profession for me to follow, owing to my father's position as a publisher. I was thereupon apprenticed to a friend of the family, Mr. G. W. Bonner, a second-rate wood-engraver, who intensified in his woodcuts the conventional mannerisms of the bold water-colour drawings which he was somewhat an adept at producing. Bonner had recently turned out two remarkably clever pupils, one of whom, named Powis, died early, while the other, Mr. W. J. Linton—the future friend of Mazzini and other advanced liberals, at a time when to know them even was regarded as a crime—is still living, and may be said to have ranked in his palmy days—John Thompson only excepted—as the first wood-engraver of his epoch. This was prior to the craze in favour of the American style of wood-engraving—all tone and no texture, and, above all, a microscopic minuteness of execution which has more the character of mechanism than of art.

Bonner employed several assistants, and had one other apprentice, who, like myself, lived with the family at Newington. Advocates of the “eight hours” craze will, no doubt, think the seventy-two hours of steady work which I got through regularly every week something excessive, whereas I simply regarded it as a matter of course.