a suppliant kneels before him. Small cuts, fitting into the columns, head the different chapters in each book, but are of no great merit. Occasionally a border about an inch wide runs up the side of one of the columns of text, usually on the outer margin, but sometimes on the inner. Altogether the book is a very notable one.
In 1493, Vérard's activity was still on the increase, and we have at least eight illustrated books of his bearing the date of this year. In the romance of Le Jouvencel and Bonnor's Arbre des Batailles, both in 4to, the cuts, all of them small, are nearly identical, and are repeated again and again in each book. Much more important than these are the editions of the Chronicques de France (printed for Vérard by Jehan Maurand), and a translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, issued under the very taking title of La Bible des Poetes. This is another of Vérard's great folios, with profuse illustrations, large and small, and in its vellum edition is a very gaudy and magnificent book. In 1494 Vérard published his Lancelot; and in 1495, a Légende Dorée and S. Jerome's Vie des Pères en françois. This last book was finished on October 15, but its appearance was preceded by that of the first volume of the publisher's most ambitious undertaking, an edition of the Miroir Historial of Vincent de Beauvais. This enormous chronicle is in thirty-two books, which Vérard divided between five great folio volumes, averaging about three hundred
and twenty leaves, printed in long double columns. The whole work thus contains about the same amount of matter as some fifty volumes of the present series, yet it was faultlessly printed on the finest vellum, and with innumerable woodcuts, subsequently coloured, in considerably less than a year. The first volume was finished on September 29, 1495, and the colophon which announces the completion of the last, 'à l'honneur et louenge de nostre seigneur iesucrist et de sa glorieuse et sacrée mere et de la court celeste de paradis,' bears date May 7th, 1496. In the face of such activity and enterprise, I feel ashamed of having girded at the good man for having used some of the Ovid cuts as a basis to his illuminations in this gigantic work.
After 1496 to the end of the century, Vérard's dated books are very few. The only one I have met with myself is a Merlin of 1498. It is possible that he produced less (the Miroir may not have proved a financial success), but it is quite as likely that he merely discontinued his wholesome practice of dating his books, and that the Boethius, the Roman de la Rose, the Gestes Romaines, the romances of Tristram and Gyron, and other undated works, whose colophons show that they were printed while the Pont Notre Dame was still standing, i.e. before October 25th, 1499, belong to these years. After 1500 Vérard's enterprise certainly seems less. He continued to issue editions of poets and romances, but they are much less sumptuous than of yore,
and in place of his great folios we have a series of small octavos, mostly of works of devotion, with no other ornament than the strange twists of the initial L, which adorns their title-pages. The example here given is from an undated and unsigned edition of the Livre du Faulcon, but the letter itself frequently occurs in Vérard's undoubted books. The first hint for this grotesque form of ornament may have been found in the small initials of Du Pré's 1486 edition of S. Jerome's Vie des anciens saintz Pères, and variants of the L were used by other publishers besides Vérard, e.g. by Jacques Maillet at Lyons, and Pierre Le Rouge and Michel Le Noir at Paris. The most noticeable examples of the L, besides the one here given, are the man-at-arms L of the 1488 edition of the Mer des Histoires (P. Lerouge), the monkey-and-bagpipes L, here shown, from Maillet's 1494 edition of the Recueil des Histoires Troyennes, a St. George-and-the-Dragon L in a Lyons reprint of the Mer des Histoires, and the January-and-May L which, I believe, was first used by Vérard for a 1492 edition of the Matheolus, or 'quinze joies du mariage,' but of which a counterpart existed at Lyons.
