Fine Books

by Alfred W. Pollard

The beginning of the reign of James I was directly responsible for one ambitious engraved publication, Stephen Harrison’s The Archs of Triumph erected in honor of the High and mighty prince James, the first of that name king of England and the sixt of Scotland, at his Maiesties Entrance and passage through his Honorable City & Chamber of London vpon the 15th day of march 1603 [1604] Invented and published by Stephen Harrison Joyner and Architect and graven by William Kip. Here an engraved titlepage, with dangling ornaments in the style of the De Bry alphabet, is followed by seven plates of the seven arches, the most notable of which (a pity it was not preserved) was crowned with a most interesting model of Jacobean London, to which the engraver has done admirable justice.

In 1608 came Robert Glover’s Nobilitas politica et civilis, re-edited two years later by T. Milles as the Catalogue of Honour, with engraved illustrations (in the text) of the robes of the various degrees of nobility, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Renold Elstracke, the son of a Flemish refugee, and also two plates representing the King in a chair of state and in Parliament. After this we come to two works illustrated by an English engraver of some note, William Hole, Tom Coryat’s Crudities (1611), with a titlepage recalling various incidents of his travels (including his being sick at sea) and five plates (or in some copies, six), and Drayton’s Polyolbion (1612, reissued in 1613 with the portrait-plate in a different state), with a poor emblematic title, a portrait of Prince Henry wielding a lance, and eighteen decorative maps of England. In 1615 we come to a really well-illustrated book, the Relation of a Journey, by George Sandys, whose narrative of travel in Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and parts of Italy, is accompanied with little delicately engraved landscapes and bits of architecture, etc., by Francis Delaram. The work of the decade is brought to a close with two print-selling ventures, the Basiliωlogia of 1618 and Herωologia of 1620. The former of these works describes itself as being “the true and lively effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest untill this present: with their severall Coats of Armes, Impreses and Devises. And a briefe Chronologie of their lives and deaths. Elegantly graven in copper. Printed for H. Holland and are to be sold by Comp.[ton] Holland over against the Exchange.” The full set of plates numbers thirty-two, including eight additions to the scheme of the book, representing the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Anne Boleyn, a second version of Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry, and Prince Charles. Fourteen of the plates, mostly the earlier ones, are signed by Elstracke, and Simon Passe and Francis Delaram each contributed four. It need hardly be said that they are of very varying degrees of authenticity as well as merit. Several of the later plates are found in more than one state.

With the second of the two ventures Henry Holland was also concerned, but the expenses of the book were shared by Crispin Passe and an Arnhem bookseller named Jansen. Its title reads: “Herωologia Anglica: hoc est clarissimorum et doctissimorum aliquot Anglorum qui floruerunt ab anno Cristi MD. usque ad presentem annum MDCXX.” It is in two volumes, the first containing thirty-seven plates, the second thirty. Two of these represent respectively Queen Elizabeth’s tomb and the hearse of Henry Prince of Wales. All the rest are portraits of the notable personages of the reigns of Henry VIII and his successors, some of them based on drawings by Holbein, the majority on earlier prints, and all engraved by William Passe (younger brother of Simon) and his sister Magdalena.

XXXVIII. LONDON. J. MARRIOT, 1638 QUARLES. HIEROGLYPHIKES OF THE LIFE OF MAN. PAGE 22 ENGRAVED BY W. MARSHALL

The next decade was far from productive of works illustrated with more than an engraved titlepage and a portrait, but in 1630 appeared Captain John Smith’s True Travels with several illustrations, one of them by Martin Droeshout; in 1634-5 came Wither’s Emblems, with plates by William Marshall, and in 1635 Thomas Heywood’s Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, with an engraved title by Thomas Cecill and plates representing the several orders, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones being entrusted to John Payne, Dominations to Marshall, Powers and Principalities to Glover, Virtues to Droeshout, etc. Some of the plates record the name of the patron who paid for them, another suggestion that it was money which stood most in the way of book-illustrating. In 1638 Marshall illustrated Quarles’s Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man, with engravings, most of which seem chiefly made up of a candle, but in one the candle is being extinguished by Death egged on by Time, and to this not very promising subject (Plate XXXVIII) Marshall, the most unequal engraver of his day, has brought some of his too rare touches of delicacy and charm. In 1640 Wenceslaus Hollar, whom Thomas Earl of Arundel had discovered at Cologne (he was born at Prague) and brought to England, published his charming costume book Ornatus Muliebris Anglicanus, and his larger work, Theatrum Mulierum, must have been almost ready when Charles I hoisted his standard at Nottingham, since it was published in 1643. After this the Civil War interfered for some time with the book trade.

While fully illustrated books were thus far from numerous in the half century which followed the Orlando Furioso of 1591, the output of engraved titlepages and portraits to be prefixed to books was sufficient to find work for most of the minor engravers. The earlier titlepages were mostly architectural and symbolical, their purport being sometimes explained in verses printed opposite to them, headed “The Mind of the Front.” William Rogers engraved a titlepage to Gerard’s Herbal (1597), which is never found properly printed, and others to Linschoten’s Discourse of Voyages into ye East and West Indies (1598), Camden’s Britannia (1600—a poor piece of work), and Moffett’s Theatrum Insectorum, this last having only survived in a copy pasted at the head of the author’s manuscript at the British Museum. William Hole did an enlarged title for Camden’s Britannia (1607), titles for the different sections of Chapman’s Homer, a portrait of John Florio for the Italian-English dictionary which he was pleased to call Queen Anna’s New World of Words, a charming titlepage to a collection of virginal music known as Parthenia (1611-12), another to Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, and much less happy ones to Drayton’s Polyolbion (1612), and the Works of Ben Jonson (1616).

The best-known titlepages engraved by Renold Elstracke are those to Raleigh’s History of the World (1614) and the Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince James (1616), the latter a good piece of work which when faced, as it should be, by the portrait of the king by Simon van de Passe, makes the most decorative opening to any English book of this period. Passe himself was responsible for the very imaginative engraved title to Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), a sea on which ships are sailing and rising out of it two pillars with the inscription: “Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia” (Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased). His son William, besides his work on the Herωologia, already mentioned, engraved a complicated title for Chapman’s version of The Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, humorously called The Crowne of all Homer’s Worckes.

After 1620 the old architectural and symbolical titlepages began to be replaced by titles in compartments, in which a central cartouche is surrounded by little squares, each representing some incident of the book. Portraits of the author remained much in request, and nearly a hundred of these were done by William Marshall, who was employed also on about as many engraved titlepages. As has been noted, his work was strangely uneven, and he fully deserved the scorn poured on him by Milton for the wretched caricature of the poet prefixed to the Poems of 1645. Yet Marshall could at times do a good plate, as, for instance, that in Quarles’s Hieroglyphikes already mentioned, a portrait of Bacon prefixed to the 1640 Oxford edition of his Advancement of Learning and the charming frontispiece to Brathwait’s Arcadian Princess. Marshall at his worst fell only a little below the work of Thomas Cross; at his best he rivalled or excelled the good work of Thomas Cecill and George Glover.

After Cromwell’s strong hand had given England some kind of settled government the book market revived, and some ambitiously illustrated books were soon being published. The too versatile John Ogilby, dancing-master, poet, and publisher, appeared early in the field, his version of the Fables of Aesop, “adorned with sculpture,” being printed by T. Warren for A. Crook in 1651. The next year came Benlowe’s Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice, a mystical poem, some copies of which have as many as thirty-six plates by various hands, with much more etching than engraving in them. In 1654 Ogilby produced his translation of Virgil, a great folio with plates dedicated to noble patrons by Pierre Lambart. Ogilby’s other important ventures were the large Odyssey of 1665, and the Aesop’s Fables of the same year, with plates by Hollar, D. Stoop, and F. Barlow, and two portraits of the translator engraved respectively by Pierre Lambert and W. Faithorne. Faithorne embellished other books of this period, e.g. the Poems of the “Matchless Orinda” (1667), with portraits, and publishers who could not afford to pay Faithorne employed R. White. The presence of a portrait by White in a copy of the first edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to which it was very far indeed from certain that it really belonged,[69] has once made the book sell for over £1400, but save for the sake of completeness his handiwork is not greatly prized by collectors, nor is there any English illustrated book of this period after the Restoration which is much sought after for the sake of its plates, although those of Ogilby’s Virgil were sufficiently well thought of to be used again for Dryden’s version in 1697.