Certainly by 1496, and possibly in earlier editions which I have not seen, Pigouchet had arrived at his typical style, of which a good specimen-page is given in our illustration from the edition of August 22, 1498. His original idea appears to have been for editions with a page of text measuring 5½ in. by 3½, such as he issued on April 17, 1496, and January 18, 1496-97. But at least as early as November 4, 1497, he added another inch both to the height and breadth of his page by the insertion of the little figures, which will be noticed at the left of the lower corner and on the right at the top. The extra inch was valuable, for it enabled him to surround his large illustrations with vignettes, but the borders themselves are not improved by them, for they mar the rich effect of the best work in which the backgrounds are of black with pricks of white.
These same dotted backgrounds, which we have already noticed as present in some of the finest of the printers' marks, appear also in three plates, which are found in the 1498 editions, and thenceforward, but, as far as I can ascertain, not earlier. These three plates illustrate (i.) the Tree of Jesse; (ii.) the Church Militant and Triumphant; (iii.) the Adoration of the Shepherds. All three plates are of great beauty, and the last is noticeable for the names—'Mahault,' 'Aloris,' 'Alison,' 'Gobin le Gay,' and 'le beau Roger'—which are assigned to the shepherds and their wives, and which are the same as those by which they are known in the French
mystery-plays. The artists who used these dotted backgrounds evidently viewed the Horae rather from the mystery-play standpoint. They cared little for the 'types' which Vérard and Du Pré so carefully explained in their early editions, but delighted in the Dance of Death and in scenes of hunting and rural life, or failing these in grotesques. They placed their talents at the disposal of religion, but they bargained to be allowed to introduce a good deal of humour as well.
The best French Horae were all published within about ten years. During this decade, which just overlaps the fifteenth century, the only serious rival of Pigouchet was Thielman Kerver, who began printing in 1497, and by dint of close imitation approached very near indeed to Pigouchet's success. With the lessening of Pigouchet's activity about 1505, there came an after-flood of bad taste, which swept everything before it. The old French designs were displaced by reproductions of German work utterly unsuited to the French types and ornaments, and along with these there came an equally disastrous substitution of florid Renaissance borders of pillars and cherubs for Pigouchet's charming vignettes and hunting scenes. Thielman Kerver, who had begun with better things, soon made his surrender to the new fashion, and his firm continued to print Horae, for which it is difficult to find a good word until about 1556. His activity was more than equalled by Gilles Hardouyn, who
with his successors was responsible for some seventy editions during the first half of the sixteenth century. Guillaume Eustace, Guillaume Godard, and François Regnault were less formidable competitors, and besides these some thirty or forty editions are attributable to other printers.
On January 16th (or to use the affected style of the colophon itself, 'xvii. Kal. Febr.'), 1525, Geoffroy Tory, the scholar, artist, and printer, in conjunction with his friend Simon Colines, brought out a Horae, which is certainly not open to the charge of bad taste. The printed page measures 6¼ in. by 3¾, the type used is a delicate Roman letter with a slight employment of red ink, but no hand work, the borders are in the most delicate style of the Renaissance. The illustrations number twelve, of which one, that of the Annunciation, occupies two pages. There are no unusual subjects, except that in the picture of the Crucifixion Tory displays his classical pedantry by surrounding the central picture with four vignettes illustrating Virgil's 'Sic vos non vobis' quatrain, on the sheep, the bees, the birds, and the oxen, whose life enriches others but not themselves. In the picture of the Adoration by the Magi, here given, Tory obtains an unusually rich effect by the figure of the negro. He repeats this, on a smaller scale, in the black raven, croaking Cras, Cras, in the picture of the Triumph of Death. The tone of the other illustrations is rather thin, and the length of the faces