He published also some great folio missals, more imposing than elegant. He had numerous sets of large initials, one specially designed for music books being really graceful, and a long array of variations on the device of the hand and compass which he adopted as his mark. The title-pages of his larger books are surrounded with heavy architectural borders, some of which were engraved on copper. At his death, in 1589, he had attained labore et constantia, as his motto phrased it, to a foremost position among the printers of his day, but his florid illustrated books have very little real beauty, and mark the beginning of a century and a half of bad taste from which only the microscopic editions of the Elzevirs are wholly free.
[18] The only other Abbeville illustrated book is the 1487 Triomphe des Neuf Preux, with conventional portraits of most of the heroes (their legs wide apart), and a bullet-headed Du Guesclin, based on authentic tradition. In a 1508 reprint by Michel le Noir at Paris, while some of the old cuts were retained this Du Guesclin was replaced by a much more showy figure.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FRENCH BOOKS OF HOURS
In the course of the fourteenth century the Hours of the Blessed Virgin superseded the Psalter as the popular book of devotions for lay use. Throughout the fifteenth century magnificently illuminated manuscript copies were produced in France in great numbers, and it is thus not surprising that it was in illustrated editions of this book that French printers and publishers achieved their most noteworthy success.
Each of the Hours, we are told, had its mystical reference to some event in the lives of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord. Lauds referred to the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, Prime to the Nativity, Terce to the Angels' Message to the Shepherds, Sext to the Adoration by the Magi, Nones to the Circumcision, Vespers to the Flight into Egypt, Compline to the Assumption of the Virgin. The subsidiary Hours of the Passion naturally suggested the Crucifixion or, less frequently, the Invention or finding of the Cross by the Emperor Constantine, and those of the Holy Spirit the Day of Pentecost. We have here the subjects for nine pictures, which were almost invariably heralded by one of the Annunciation, and might easily be increased by a
representation of the Adoration by the Shepherds, of the Murder of the Innocents, and the Death of the Virgin. Moreover, the contents of Books of Hours were gradually enlarged till they deserved the title, which has been given them, of the Lay-Folk's Prayer-Book. A typical Book of Hours would contain—
(i.) A Kalendar (one picture).
(ii.) Passages from the Gospels on the Passion of Christ. (One to three pictures.)
(iii.) Private Prayers.
(iv.) The Hours themselves—Horae intemeratae beatae Mariae Virginis—with the subsidiary Hours of the Passion and of the Holy Ghost. (Nine to thirteen pictures.)
(v.) The Seven Penitential Psalms. (One or two pictures.)
(vi.) The Litany of the Saints.
(vii.) The Vigils of the Dead. (One to four pictures.)
(viii.) Seven Psalms on Christ's Passion.