We see that the arts of drawing and engraving had improved since the time of the 'Biblia Pauperum.' The figures are in better proportion: in many of the designs the folds of the dress fall more gracefully and the shading is more artistically done. There are four fifteenth-century editions of this work known, two with the text in Dutch, and two in Latin. Three editions are printed entirely with movable type, while part of the fourth—the second Latin edition—is certainly from engraved blocks. No one can tell the reason of this curious anomaly—we can only conjecture. Experts tell the various editions by the state of the cuts; when these are unblemished, it is assumed that they are of the first edition; when a few of the lines of the cuts are broken, it is supposed that they belong to the second edition; when many are broken, to the third edition, and so on.
Mr. Woodbery[[3]] has so graphically described the 'Speculum' that we cannot do better than quote his words: 'A whole series needs to be looked at before one can appreciate the interest which these designs have in indicating the subjects on which imagination and thought were then exercised, and the modes in which they were exercised. Symbolism and mysticism pervade the whole. All nature and history seem to have existed only to prefigure the life of the Saviour: imagination and thought hover about Him, and take colour, shape, and light only from that central form; the stories of the Old Testament, the histories of David, Samson, and Jonah, the massacres, victories, and miracles there recorded, foreshadow, as it were in parables, the narrative of the Gospels; the temple, the altar, and the ark of the covenant, all the furnishings and observances of the Jewish ritual, reveal occult meanings; the garden of Solomon's Song, and the sentiment of the Bridegroom and the Bride who wander in it, are interpreted, sometimes in graceful or even poetic feeling, under the inspiration of mystical devotion; old kings of pagan Athens are transformed into witnesses of Christ, and, with the Sibyl of Rome, attest spiritual truth.
This book and others like it are mirrors of the ecclesiastical mind; they picture the principal intellectual life of the Middle Ages; they show the sources of that deep feeling in the earlier Dutch artists which gave dignity and sweetness to their works. Even in the rudeness of these books, in the texts as well as in the designs, there is a naïveté, an openness and freshness of nature, a confidence in limited experience and contracted vision, which make the sight of these cuts as charming as conversation with one who had never heard of America or dreamed of Luther, and who would have found modern life a puzzle and an offence. The author of the Speculum laments the evils which fell upon man in consequence of Adam's sin, and recounts them: blindness, deafness, lameness, floods, fire, pestilence, wild beasts, and law-suits (in such order he arranges them); and he ends the long list with this last and heaviest evil, that men should presume to ask "why God willed to create man, whose fall He foresaw; why He willed to create the angels, whose ruin He foreknew; wherefore He hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and softened the heart of Mary Magdalene unto repentance; wherefore He made Peter contrite, who had denied Him thrice, but allowed Judas to despair in his sin; wherefore He gave grace to one thief, and cared not to give grace to his companion." What modern man can fully realise the mental condition of this poet, who thus weeps over the temptation to ask these questions, as the supreme and direst curse which Divine vengeance allows to overtake the perverse children of this world?'
By far the most excellent book issued about this time is The Psalter, printed by Gutenberg's former partners, Fust and Schoeffer, at Mentz in 1459. The initial letters, which are printed in red and blue and the Gothic type, all of which are in exact imitation of the best manuscripts, could not be excelled at the present day. The book belongs more to the History of Printing, but on account of its beautiful initial letters, which, it is said, were drawn and engraved by Schoeffer, we feel constrained to notice it.
