As to borrowing, there is not much to be said. I believe a few instances of it may be found, e.g. Matthaeus Cerdonis tells us distinctly that he printed an edition of a 'Cheiromantia' (Padua, 1484) 'Erhardi Ratdolt instrumentis.' But it was undoubtedly, and for obvious reasons, very rare, and where it existed mostly indicates some specially close relations between the two firms. Thus Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem appears to have borrowed some of Leeu's cuts for a 'Lijden ons Heeren,' printed in December 1483, but on Bellaert's disappearance in 1486 most of his cuts and types are found in the possession of Leeu, and it is doubtful if we should not look on his press rather as a branch establishment of Leeu's than as altogether independent. We have also to be very careful in our examination of cuts before building any theories of borrowing, or special relations between different firms, as in some cases, notably in many of Vérard's 'Horae,' in which we seem at first sight to find cuts from the editions of Philippe Pigouchet, we are really confronted with copies so closely imitated that it requires a minute comparison to show that they are printed from different blocks.
When we pass from borrowing to buying we open up an endless field for investigation, and one rich in small surprises.
Mr. Falconer Madan showed me some years ago, in a Civil War Tract in the Thomason Collection at the British Museum, a very worn cut, French in appearance, representing S. John the Evangelist and the eagle by which he is symbolised. It puzzled me at the time, but I soon afterwards identified it with the printer's device of Robert Wyer, in use by him more than a hundred years earlier. Almost as great an age was probably attained by a head-piece of terminal archers, with rabbits, etc., which I first noticed in the 1598 edition of Sidney's 'Arcadia,' and found still retained in the fourteenth edition, dated 1670. The interval between these two editions of itself exceeds the threescore and ten years which ought to suffice for the life of a wood-block as of a man, but I have since found the same head-piece in a prayer book, printed about 1585, and as it is in no way appropriate to this, have no doubt that its original appearance was even earlier.
In another rather amusing series of migrations my pride as a discoverer has been tempered by the verdict of a lynx-eyed friend that the blocks in question at one period of their career have been recut, but their history is still curious. If any one will turn to the 1575 edition of 'A Ryght pithy pleasaunt and merie Comédie. Intytuled Gammer Gurton's Needle. Played on stage, not longe ago in Christes Colledge in Cambridge,' he will see that the title-page of this our second printed comedy, 'made by Mr. S—— Mr. of Art,' and 'imprinted at London in Fleete streat beneth the Conduit at the sign of S. John Evangelist by Thomas Colwel,' is surrounded by a kind of garland supported by two fat little boys; and if we turn next to the last leaf of the 'Champfleury,' that most pedantical treatise, written and published by the French artist-printer, Geoffroy Tory in 1529, there the same not very beautiful design will confront us. The concatenation of the 'Champfleury' and 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' is of itself delightful, but chance has enabled me to add two additional incongruities, for I have found it again in a copy of the 'Christiani Hominis Institutio,' by Stephanus Paris, printed in 1552 by Michael Fezandat for Vivantius Gaulterot, who had published the second edition of the 'Champfleury' three years earlier, and once more in William Copland's edition, dated 1553, of Bishop Douglas's 'XII. Bukes of Eneados.' Thus we know within a few months the date at which this block, which had previously been recut, crossed the Channel, and there is some reason to believe that some more of Tory's old designs came over with it, for I have lately noticed three fragments of borders used in Tory's 'Horae' of 1525 reappearing in a 'Letter to Reginald Pole,' by Tunstall and Stokesley, printed by Wolfe in 1560. Like the larger design, these fragments have been recut, but with considerable skill, so that we may be sure that the recutting was done in France, and at no very long interval after 1525, the lines in the original blocks being so fine that they would soon need replacing.
FROM GEOFFROY TORY'S 'CHAMPFLEURY,' 1529.
As an appendix to this section of my paper, it occurred to me to look at the cuts in some of the Roxburghe Ballads, and a glance through the first volume yielded some curious results. Thus a ballad entitled 'Friendly Counsaile,' by C. R. [Charles Records?], printed for J. W[right], the younger, about 1630, has two cuts, the first of Christ teaching the twelve Apostles, which can be traced back through the 'Kalender of Sheppards' to Vérard's 'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir' of 1492; the second of two of the three gay cavaliers, who met their own corpses as they hunted (les trois vifs et les trois morts), which occurs in French Horae of about the same date. Another ballad entitled 'Christmas' Lamentation for the losse of his Acquaintance, showing how he is forst to leave the country and come to London,' is headed by a little figure of a man, which I first saw in the verso of the title of Wynkyn de Worde's edition of 'Hycke Scorner,'[6] where it is labelled 'Pyte.' This also is ultimately French, and was also originally first cut for Vérard's French Terence. 'Doctor Dogood's directions to cure many diseases' has in the first part half of a cut from the 'Art de bien vivre,' representing Aaron and the Israelites going to meet, not, as in the original, Moses, who bears the Tables of the Law, but two English gentlemen, who are joined on in a block of much smaller size. The second part has also an old cut, which appears to be imitated from the Dutch. Another Dutch fifteenth-century design is used in the second part of 'The Discontented Married Man,' and there are two more fifteenth-century blocks (recut) in the 'Jovial Broom-man,' a cut from a French 'Æsop' in 'A New Medley, or a Messe altogether,' and a piece of an Augsburg block in 'The praise of our country Barley Brake.' Besides these we may note the presence at the head of a ballad called 'Solomon's Sacrifice,' printed for Henry Gosson, of the cut of a printing-press which occurs in 'The Ordinarie of Christians,' printed by Scoloker about 1548. Of other cuts I only suspect the history, and the instances I have quoted are sufficient to show the long life these designs enjoyed in England.
Like some other branches of natural history, 'bibliology,' to use an absurd word, would be very dull if it could all be mapped out and tabulated ready to our hand, but in cut-hunting, as in fox-hunting, there is pleasure to be gained from pursuit, if not from attainment, and especially in English books of the sixteenth century there is never any difficulty in finding a promising cut to hunt. It may be said, indeed, that whoever attempts to write the history of wood-engraving in England during this period will need to be quite as well acquainted with the productions of the French press as of the English. Unfortunately this is no easy matter, for except for a magnificent collection of Vérards mostly from the old Royal Library, and a goodly number of Horae, the British Museum is by no means rich in early French books, and I know of no other English library which can do much to supply its deficiencies. But the fact remains that between the large importation of French blocks, the direct imitation of many others, and the probable presence of French woodcutters working in England, the field for any one desirous of tracing a native school of wood-engraving, if such a school can be said to have existed, is full of pitfalls, from which only a very wide knowledge of the cuts in contemporary French books (and to a less extent also of Dutch and German ones) can offer deliverance.
The backwardness of England in the pictorial arts made it possible for old wood blocks to enjoy here an unusually long life. In other countries their career was cut short by decisive changes of taste. Thus the sudden inroad of the Renaissance into Germany at the close of the fifteenth century swept away almost the whole of the delightfully simple work produced between 1470 and 1490. One curious case of survival is perhaps worth mentioning. In an edition of Wyle's 'Translation oder Deutschungen etlicher Bücher,' printed at Augsburg in 1536, the cuts to all the stories but one show contemporary work of the usual kind. The exception is the tale of Guiscard and Sigismund, the illustrations to which must be quite half a century earlier, and exhibit all the simplicity of feeling and workmanship of the artists of Augsburg, in their best days.
In France we have the same tale, for it is impossible to conceive not merely of the Estiennes, but of a popular publisher like Jean de Tournes, decorating his books with the simple cuts we find in books by Vérard or Trepperel. In the Horae the publisher's needs were sometimes too imperative to be resisted, and amid the coarse and realistic engravings which, to the destruction of the charm of these books, came into vogue about 1505, the old designs from the editions of Pigouchet and Vérard are often found for some ten years longer. Italy is in somewhat a different position, for there, in the fifteenth century, the distinction between the books of the people and the books of the rich had been unusually clearly marked, and while the tastes of the rich changed the popular literature was far more conservative. The little Florentine cuts, of which examples are given in another article, are by far the most striking example of this stability of the popular taste. It is probable that no new ones were designed after 1520 at the latest, but the old designs continued in use for more than sixty years after this date, battered by successive editions till their borders were knocked to pieces, but still retaining much of their old beauty, and occasionally, by some lucky chance, finding a printer who did them justice. When the old blocks became unusable, the designs were recut, and it is sometimes possible to trace them through as many as three different stages of successive deterioration. In Venice the little vignettes, so popular between 1490 and 1500, enjoyed a similar, but much shorter, extension of life, the preference for the heavier style of engraving which came in with the turn of the century driving them down into the chap-books, where their original delicacy of line soon procured their destruction at the hands of hasty printers.