OLD PICTURE BOOKS

WITH OTHER ESSAYS ON
BOOKISH SUBJECTS, BY

ALFRED W. POLLARD

LONDON: METHUEN AND CO
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. 1902

To JOHN MACFARLANE,
Librarian of the Imperial Library, Calcutta.

My dear Macfarlane,—

Just as you had completed a valuable monograph on that enterprising French publisher Antoine Vèrard, you were whirled away to India to organise a great library at Calcutta. I have seen it stated in the newspapers, on high authority, that your Imperial Library is to be a second British Museum, but I am afraid that, even when fully developed by your energy and skill, it will contain no Vèrards. I hope, however, that when you come over on furlough you will resume the pleasant studies we used to pursue together, and that you may even be induced to read another paper before the learned Society of which you were once my fellow secretary. To keep alive your interest in old books is thus a reasonable pretext for dedicating to you these bookish essays. My real hope is that as they stand on your book-shelf they may remind you of the original British Museum and of the many friends you left behind here after your seventeen years' work amid our Bloomsbury fogs.

Faithfully yours,
Alfred W. Pollard

NOTE

The paper on 'England and the Bookish Arts' originally appeared as an introduction to 'The English Bookman's Library' (Kegan Paul and Co.). The other Essays are reprinted from 'Bibliographica,' 'The Connoisseur,' 'The Guardian,' 'The Library,' 'The King's College School Magazine,' 'Longman's Magazine,' 'Macmillan's Magazine,' 'The Newbery House Magazine,' 'The Pageant,' and the 'Transactions' of the Bibliographical Society. Separate acknowledgment of its source is made at the beginning of each paper, but the author desires here to thank the Publishers and Editors to whom he is indebted for permission to reprint. All the essays have been revised, and some of the illustrations appear here for the first time.

CONTENTS

[OLD PICTURE BOOKS]

THE SIEGE OF NOVA TROJA. FROM GRÜNINGER'S 'VIRGIL': STRASSBURG, 1502

IN the edition of Virgil published by Grüninger at Strassburg in 1502, Sebastian Brant boasted that the illustrations to it, whose preparation he had superintended, made the story of the book as plain to the unlearned as to the learned:

'Hic legere historias commentaque plurima doctus,
Nec minus indoctus perlegere illa potest.'

The boast was no ill-founded one, though it must be granted that Virgil would have been puzzled by the cannon here shown as employed in the siege of Nova Troja, and similar mediævalisms abound throughout the volume. Coming almost at the end of the first series of early illustrated books, the Virgil of 1502 thus exemplifies two of the chief features to which they owe their charm: the power of telling a story and the readiness to import into the most uncongenial themes some touches of the life of their own day. But by Brant's time illustration was already losing its pristine simplicity. It could hardly be otherwise when such a man as Brant, who had just gained a European reputation by his 'Narrenschiff,' was concerning himself with it. At the outset it had been rather a craft than an art, alike in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands, and in France, and, if we do not add England to the list, it is only because in England the workmen, though naïve enough in all conscience, were so entirely untrained that to call them craftsmen would be too great a compliment. But whether skilled or unskilled, the woodcutters' objects were everywhere the same: to render his design with the greatest possible simplicity of outline, to tell the story with a directness which often verges on caricature, and to keep his pictures in decorative harmony with the type-page on which they were to appear, printed with the same pull of the press, with the same excellent ink, on the same excellent paper.

In papers brought together in this volume the reader is asked to look at the woodcuts to two old Italian Bibles, at the beautiful cuts which make the Florentine Miracle Plays or Rappresentazioni so highly esteemed, at the illustrations to French editions of the 'Hours of the Blessed Virgin,' and at some examples of the curious transformations and vicissitudes which old wood blocks and the designs for them went through ere yet either clichés or photographic processes had been invented. The reproductions which accompany these and other articles will give a better idea of these Old Picture Books to those who do not already know them than could be conveyed by any verbal descriptions. Here it may suffice to emphasise one or two points which are often overlooked.

In the first place, it may have been noticed that not only do we speak of woodcuts, a common enough word, but also of woodcutters, a term which, until Sir Martin Conway used it in the title of his 'The Woodcutters of the Netherlands,' where it was ridiculed at the time as suggesting the stalwart workmen who cut down trees, was hardly ever employed in this sense. It cannot be denied that the use of the word sometimes lands us in incongruities of phrase; but inasmuch as there is no evidence of the graver having been used in woodcuts before the eighteenth century, it is clearly wrong to speak of the early craftsmen as engravers, and it is only fair in estimating their performance to remember that they worked with no better tool than a knife.

As regards the material they used, it was no doubt as a rule wood; but experts are agreed—I know not on what evidence—that instead of the blocks cut across the grain adopted by the modern engraver, they used wood sawn perpendicularly down the grain, as in an ordinary plank. It is certain, however, that in addition to wood some soft kind of metal, spoken of in one place (the list of border-cuts in one of Du Pré's 'Horae') as cuivre, or copper, but generally identified with pewter, was also used. This use of metal encouraged in some of the French 'Books of Hours,' notably in those of Philippe Pigouchet, a finer and closer method of work than we can believe was at that time possible on wood; but the general handling was precisely the same, and it is often only when we see a thin line bending instead of breaking, as wood did, that we know for certain that the craftsman was working on metal. For this reason the term woodcut is often applied to metal cuts worked in the style of wood as well as to woodcuts properly so called, and though doubtless reprehensible, the confusion is not nearly so misleading as that between cuts and engravings.

A third fact has already been emphasised, namely, that the makers of the woodcuts, and I think we may add the designers of them also, never put their names to their work or troubled themselves in any way to preserve their individuality. Save for the 'Nuremberg Chronicle' of Hartmann Schedel—a large book and a fine one, but of no unusual artistic merit—the cuts in which are associated with the names of Wohlgemuth (the father-in-law of Dürer) and Pleydenwurff, I do not know of any single illustrated book of the fifteenth century the designs in which can be attributed to a known artist. In Venetian cuts towards the end of the century it is not uncommon to find a small initial letter, such as the b in the Giunta Bibles, the F of a Livy, the N of an Ovid, appearing on some of the blocks; but, after much learned disquisition, it is now generally agreed that this is merely the mark of a woodcutter's workshop. As to the organisation of these workshops, we have, unhappily, no information. All that we know is that at Augsburg, where, before the introduction of printing, woodcutting had been extensively employed for playing-cards and figures of saints, the cutters had formed themselves into a flourishing guild, and were able to insist that the making of the illustrations for books should be left in their hands as a condition of the printers being allowed to use them.

The only other point which it seems necessary to mention is that illustrated books in the fifteenth century were intended to attract very much the same class of purchasers for whose benefit they are produced at the present day.

People often run away with one of two contradictory ideas, that all early books were very costly and only prepared for princes, or that illustrated books were then the Books of the People, and therefore possessed all sorts of beautiful properties not discoverable in the bourgeois volumes we get at Mudie's. Of course both these ideas have some foundation. Profusely illuminated manuscripts, whether Prayer-Books or Romances, were literally a luxury reserved for princes; but then a profusely illuminated manuscript is not only a book, it is a picture-gallery as well, and even now, when prices have risen to what seem extravagant heights, the fine manuscripts which can be bought for from one to two thousand pounds are probably the cheapest art-treasures on the market. But until quite the end of the fifteenth century princes cared very little for printed books, thinking them rather cheap and common, even to the extent of refusing to have them in their libraries. More than this, rich connoisseurs generally, and not merely princes, when they patronised printed books at all, preferred them quite plain, finely printed, but with no pictures in them. They even preferred them without any printed initial letters, no doubt telling each other it was so much nicer to have the initials prettily painted in by hand,—just as there are some people who prefer books in paper covers, because they can have them bound as they please. We all know that most paper-cover books melt away and never get bound at all; and most of the books which were to have painted initials remain to this day with the blank places still unfilled. But it was a very pretty theory, and it shows clearly enough that the rich people who held it cared nothing for printed ornaments, and à fortiori nothing for printed illustrations.

On the other hand, though some of the books we are concerned with were probably sold for less than sixpence, sixpence in the fifteenth century was worth five or six shillings now, and, in fact, from five shillings to five guineas very fairly represents the range of prices of early illustrated books. Thus the cheapest of them, the little Florentine chap-books, are not really the equivalent of our modern penny dreadfuls, but rather of the pretty gift-books with which publishers tempt us every Christmas. There was no fifteenth century equivalent to our modern penny dreadfuls, because the sort of people who now read penny dreadfuls then read nothing at all. As soon as they began to read, plenty of bad pictures were produced to please them.

If this prologue did not already threaten to be too long, it would be interesting to advance the theory that the great body of readers in every civilisation has always been drawn from much the same class as at present, and also that the price of books, when we allow for the different value of money, has varied equally little. In any case, it should be understood that early illustrated books were neither very rare nor very miraculously cheap, but cost about the same as the illustrated books of to-day, and were intended for about the same class of readers.

Up to a few years ago it was possible for quiet folk of this class to possess some specimens of the old books as well as of the new. Unfortunately during the last quarter of a century, and more especially during the last decade of it, the collecting of them has become a hobby which can only be pursued by the very rich. Save perhaps the first editions of masterpieces of our own literature, no books have advanced so rapidly in market-value as those with illustrations. A recent lawsuit has brought into prominence the case of the 'Quatriregio' of Bishop Frezzi, a copy of which, bought some thirty years ago for sixty guineas, has now to be valued by experts, who will apparently have to decide whether its present worth should be fixed as nearer to five hundred or eight hundred pounds, the two last prices at which copies are believed to have changed hands. The little Florentine 'Rappresentazioni,' mostly with only a single cut on their title, the subject of my first paper, used to be purchasable for a few shillings apiece; they have now to be bought with almost as many bank-notes, and a good example of a French 'Book of Hours' is supposed to be cheap at a hundred and twenty pounds. It is well that beautiful books should be honoured, but book-lovers may not unreasonably regret the days when it was still possible for a man of moderate means to possess them.

[FLORENTINE RAPPRESENTAZIONI AND THEIR PICTURES][1]

FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. ORSOLA,' 1554

BETWEEN the twelfth century and the sixteenth nearly every country in Europe possessed some sort of a religous drama, which in many cases has lingered on, nearly or quite, to the present day. Even in England—in Yorkshire, in Dorset and Sussex, and perhaps in other counties—the old Christmas play of S. George and the Dragon is not quite extinct, though in its latter days its action has been rendered chaotic by the introduction of King George III., Admiral Nelson, and other national heroes, whose relation to either the Knight or the Dragon is a little difficult to follow. The stage directions, which are fairly numerous in most of the old plays which have been preserved, enable us to picture to ourselves the successive stages of their development with considerable minuteness. In some churches the 'sepulchre' is still preserved to which, in the earliest liturgical dramas, the choristers advanced, in the guise of the three Maries, to act over again the scene on the first Easter-day; while of that other scene, when at Christmas the shepherds brought their simple offerings, a cap, a nutting-stick, or a bob of cherries to the Holy Child, a trace still exists in the representation, either by a transparency or a model, of the manger of Bethlehem, still common in Roman Catholic churches, and not unknown in some English ones. When the scene of the plays was removed from the inside of the church to the churchyard, we hear of the crowds who desecrated the graves in their eagerness to see the performance; and later still, when the craft-guilds had burdened themselves with the expenses of their preparation, we have curious descriptions of the waggons upon which each scene of the great cycles 'of matter from the beginning of the world to the Day of Judgment,' was set up, in order that scene after scene might be rolled before the spectators at the street corners or the market place, throughout the length of a midsummer day. Artists with an antiquarian turn have endeavoured to picture for us these curious stages. In Sharp's 'Dissertation on the Coventry Mysteries' there is a frontispiece giving an imaginary view of a performance; and only a few years ago an article was published in an American magazine, with really delightful illustrations, depicting the working of the elaborate stage machinery behind the scenes, as well as the effects with which the spectators were regaled. But of contemporary illustrations the lack remains grievous and irreparable. In England we have nothing at all for the Miracle Plays, while for the moralities by which they were superseded, the only manuscript illustration is a picture of the castle in the 'Castle of Perseverance,' in which, with the aid of his good angels, its occupant, Man, was set to resist the attacks of the deadly sins and all the hosts of hell! The later moralities, printed by Wynkyn de Worde and his contemporaries early in the sixteenth century, have in one or two instances a few figures on the face or back of the title-page, to which labels bearing the names of the characters are attached. But these were venerable cuts, which had done duty on previous occasions for other subjects; and so far from being specially designed to represent the players on an English stage, were really French in their origin, and only copied from old woodcuts of Antoine Vérard's 'Terence.'

In France we have much the same tale. It is true that so many of the old French Mysteries still remain in manuscript, unexplored, that there is a possibility of some pleasant surprise in store for us. But the printed plays were either not illustrated at all, or sent forth with only a handful of conventional cuts. One little ray of light, however, we have in the pictures, especially of the Annunciation to the Shepherds and their Adoration, in many of the numerous editions of the 'Hours of the Blessed Virgin' (the lay-folk's prayer-books, as they have been called, of those days), which, from about 1490 onwards, attained the same popularity in print which they had previously enjoyed in manuscript. In these illustrations we see the shepherds, with their women-folk about them, as they watched their flocks till startled by the angel's greeting, and again crowding round the manger at Bethlehem. In one edition, from which a reproduction is given in a later essay in this volume, they even bear on labels the names Gobin le gai, le beau Roger, Mahault, Aloris, etc., by which they were known in the plays.

But however ready we may be to trace the influence of the miracle plays in these pictures, as illustrations of the plays themselves they are very inadequate; and the fact remains that in only one country, and practically only in one city in that country (for the Siena editions are merely reprints) did the religious plays, which in one form or another were then being acted all over Europe, receive any contemporary illustration. This one city was Florence; and alike for the special form in which the religious drama was there developed, for the causes which contributed to its popularity at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for its close connection with the popular art of the day, the subject is one of considerable interest. On its literary and religious side, the late John Addington Symonds discussed it in 'Studies of the Italian Renaissance' with his usual ability, and many of the plays have been reprinted by Signor Ancona. Of late years the little pictures by which they are illustrated have also received attention, a fact amply attested by the extraordinary rise in their market value. But it is worth while to bring together, even if only in outline, the pictures and the plays to which they belong, more closely than has hitherto been attempted, and this is my object in the present paper.

Book-illustration in Italy began very early with the publication in 1467, by Ulric Hahn, at Rome, of an edition of the 'Meditations' of Cardinal Torquemada on the Life and Passion of Christ. For the next twenty years its progress was only sporadic, and though we find illustrations of greater or less artistic value in books printed at Naples, Rome, Ferrara, Verona, and Venice, we can only group them together in twos and threes; there is absolutely no trace of any school of illustrators. From this sporadic growth Florence was not entirely excluded, for besides a treatise on geography we find in the 1477 edition of Bettini's 'Monte Santo di Dio,' and the famous 1481 'Dante,' pictures of very considerable interest. They differ, however, from those of the illustrated books of other Italian towns, in being not woodcuts but engravings on copper, and it is a remarkable fact that until the year 1490 no Florentine book is known which contains a cut. The signs of wear in a woodcut of the dead Christ which appears early in that year, has given rise to a belief that there may have been some previous illustrated edition, now lost; but it is more probable that the picture had only been printed separately for pasting into books of devotion. In any case, it stands apart, with but one other cut, slightly later in date, from all other Florentine work, and must be looked on only as an example of the sporadic illustrations of which we have spoken as appearing in other districts. But from the 28th of September, 1490, onwards for twenty years, we have a succession of woodcuts which, amid all the differences which give them individuality, are yet closely linked together in style, and form, on the whole, by far the finest series of book-illustrations of early date. The popularity which these woodcuts attained is attested by the repeated editions of the works in which they appear; while the suddenness with which they sprang up, the general similarity of style, and the nature of the books they illustrate, all suggest that we have here to deal with a conscious and carefully directed movement as opposed to the haphazard use of illustrations in other cities during the previous twenty years.

FROM JACOPONE DA TODI'S 'LAUDE,' 1490

The book in which the first characteristic Florentine woodcut appears is an edition of the 'Laude,' of Jacopone da Todi, printed by Francesco Buonaccorsi; and both the choice of the book and the name of the printer offer a tempting basis for theory-making. Printing, we must remember, though it had been in use for more than a third of a century, was even then a new craft, and was still taken up sometimes as a side-employment by many persons who had been bred to other trades or professions. Our own Caxton, as we all know, was a mercer; the first printer at St. Albans, a schoolmaster; Francesco Tuppo, of Naples, a jurist; Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, of Rome, a physician; and so on. In natural continuation, however, of the work of the Scriptorium in many monasteries, we find that a large number of the early printers were members of monasteries or priests, and it was to this latter order that the Buonaccorsi who printed the 'Laude' belonged. Now, the name Buonaccorsi is the name of the family of Savonarola's mother. A few months before the appearance of the 'Laude' the great Dominican has been recalled to Florence by Lorenzo de' Medici, and his first public sermon there—a sermon which had stirred the whole city to its depths—had been preached on the previous 1st of August. In the next year we find Buonaccorsi printing the first edition of the 'Libro della vita viduale,' the earliest dated Savonarola tract of which I know; and I have not been able to resist hazarding the conjecture that between the preacher-monk and the priest-printer there may have been some tie of blood, and that it was to Savonarola that the splendid series of Florentine illustrated books owed their origin.

That this should be the case would not be surprising. Savonarola was no Puritan, or rather he was like the Puritans of the better sort, and loved art so long as it was subservient to the main object of man's being. The pamphlets with which he flooded Florence during the next few years are, for the most part, decorated with a cut on their first page or title; and if the subject were ever worked out, it would probably be found that this was uniformly the case with the original editions, and those issued with the author's supervision, while the unillustrated copies are mere reprints, which the absence of any law of copyright made it possible for any printer, who thought it worth his while, to issue, with or without the author's leave. The woodcuts to the Savonarola tracts number from forty to sixty, according as we include or reject variants on the same subject, and fall naturally into three divisions, illustrating respectively the Passion of Christ, the duties of Prayer and Preparation for Death, and various aspects of Savonarola's activity, in which, however, the representations of him are always imaginary, never drawn from life. As an example of these cuts, I give that which decorates the title-page of an undated edition (circa 1495) of the 'Operetta della oratione mentale.' I have had occasion to use this before in my little work on 'Early Illustrated Books,' but there is a certain largeness of pictorial effect about it which gives this cut, I think, quite the first place in the series, and makes me unwilling to take any other as an example. The cuts in the 'Rappresentazioni' are seldom quite as good as this, but they form a parallel series to those of the Savonarola tracts, occasionally borrowing an illustration from those on the Passion of Christ, and evidently inspired by the same aims. The same types (our only means of fixing the printers of these dateless little books), were used in many of the works of both the series, and it does not seem fanciful to believe that Savonarola, either directly or through some trusted disciple, was nearly as intimately connected with the one as he undoubtedly was with the other.

FROM SAVONAROLA'S 'DELLA ORATIONE MENTALE,' S.A.

We have said that the choice of the work in which appeared the first typical Florentine woodcut was not without interest for our subject. Jacopone da Todi, whom the cut exhibits kneeling in an ecstasy of prayer before a vision of the Blessed Virgin, was a Franciscan mystic, eccentric to the verge of madness in his manners, but a spiritual poet of no mean ability, and the reputed author of the 'Stabat Mater.' He died in 1306, and was probably old enough to have remembered that strange epidemic of the Battuti, when thousands of frenzied men and women marched from city to city, scourging themselves almost to death for the sinfulness of the world, till their career had to be stopped by the free use of the gallows. When the frenzy was past, those who survived it formed themselves into companies for the continuance of their religious exercises in a more moderate form, and from their meeting together to sing their 'Laude,' hymns of a peculiarly personal fervour, in the chapels of their guilds, they obtained the name 'Laudesi.' Of the writers of these 'Laude,' Jacopone da Todi was the greatest, and it was out of the 'Laude' that the later 'Rappresentazioni' were gradually developed. In his excellent account of the 'Rappresentazioni,' to which I have already alluded, Mr. J. A. Symonds seems to me to have laid rather undue stress on the manner in which this development took place, as offering a contrast to the history of the religious drama in other countries. It is true that in England the plays which have come down to us belong almost exclusively to the great cycles which unrolled the history of man from the creation till the crack of doom, but we have mention of several plays on the lives of the Saints—e.g. one on S. George and the Dragon, and another (which survives) on S. Mary Magdalene, and the popularity at one time of these Miracle Plays, properly so called, is witnessed by the fact that it is their name under which the cycles of Scriptural dramas generally passed. At Florence these longer dramas were not wholly unknown, but they seem to have been acted only in pantomime or dumb-show, in the great pageants on S. John's Day, the shorter plays developing from the 'Laude' just as, at an earlier period, the liturgical dramas had developed in France and England out of the dramatic recital of the gospel of the day. It is worth noting, by the way, that the 'Laude' themselves were not superseded, but continued to be written and sung when the 'Rappresentazioni' were already becoming popular. Two of the writers of them during this period have a special interest for us—Maffeo Belcari, as the author also of the earliest printed 'Rappresentazione,' and Girolamo Benivieni, as the friend and disciple of Savonarola, whose doctrine and prophecies he defended in 1496 in a tract, printed, this also, by Buonaccorsi.

FROM 'LAUDE DEVOTE DI DIVERSI AUTORI,' S.A.

In an edition of a collection of 'Laude' by various writers, there is an interesting cut representing the 'Laudesi,' standing before a Madonna, singing her praise. In course of time dramatic divisions had been admitted into the 'Laude,' and under the name of 'Divozioni' they were recited with appropriate action in dialogue form. The actors were for the most part boys, who were formed into confraternities, while the expenses of the plays were doubtless defrayed by their parents. As the dramatic element in the performances became more decided, the plays came at last to be generally termed 'Rappresentazioni,' and under this name they attained a great popularity during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and the first of its successor.

Unlike the northern Miracle Plays, which are almost without exception anonymous, many of the earliest 'Rappresentazioni' which have come down to us contain the names of their authors, and in editions separated by half a century the text remains substantially unaltered. In English plays the text often appears to have grown up by a process of accretion, so that a cycle, or even a single play, in the form in which it has survived, could hardly with justice be assigned to a single author, even if we knew the name of the first writer concerned in it. The difference is not unimportant, and is one of numerous small signs which tell us that the religious drama in Florence, at least in this stage of its development, was less popular, less spontaneous, than in our own country, and more the result of deliberate religious effort.

The earliest 'Rappresentazione' printed was the 'Abraham' of the Maffeo (or Feo) Belcari, whom we have already mentioned. It was printed in 1485, the year after Belcari's death at a good old age (he was born in 1410), so that all Belcari's plays were published posthumously. Among them are plays on the Annunciation, on S. John the Baptist visited by Christ in the Desert, and on S. Panuntius. Of the last two of these I have seen fifteenth-century editions—the one at the British Museum, the other at the Bodleian Library, each with a single charming woodcut. No less a person than Lorenzo de' Medici was the author of the play of 'San Giovanni e San Paolo,' which has also come down to us in its original edition with a graceful cut; and Bernardo Pulci, who died in the first year of the sixteenth century, produced a play on the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat. But the most prolific of these dramatists seems to have been a woman, Bernardo's wife Antonia, to whose pen we owe plays on the Patriarch Joseph, the Prodigal Son, S. Francis of Assisi, S. Domitilla, S. Guglielma, etc. The names of a few other writers are known; but there were also numerous anonymous plays, written very much on the same lines, to some of which we shall have to allude.

Almost invariably the plays begin with a Prologue spoken by an Angel, who is represented in the title-cut of Lorenzo de' Medici's 'San Giovanni e San Paolo' as standing behind the two saints in a kind of pulpit. In other early plays the Angel is represented in a separate woodcut (shown at the beginning of this article) whose lower border is cut off, so as to fix on to the border of the special title-cut of the play. Later on, another design was substituted for this, without any border at all. I think it probable that these angelic prologuisings were mostly spoken from some machine at the back of the stage, especially contrived for celestial appearances. In other respects, the services of the stage-carpenter do not seem to have been much called for. The plays were acted, we are told, either in the chapel of the guild or confraternity, or in the refectory of a convent, and the arrangements were probably very similar to those in modern school-plays, the imagination of the spectators being often required to take the place of a change of scene. In the so-called 'Coventry' Plays we hear of a device by which a new scene, or perhaps rather a new centrepiece, with the actors all in their places, could be wheeled round to the front; but more often all the dramatis personae were grouped at the back or sides, and individual actors merely stepped forward when their turn came. In the play of 'San Lorenzo' we are expressly told that two scenes were shown simultaneously on different parts of the stage, Decius and his satellites offering their heathen sacrifices on the one side, while Pope Sixtus comforts the faithful against the coming persecution on the other. This combination of two scenes in one is a familiar feature in mediæval art, and is not unknown even in these Florentine woodcuts, small as they are: witness our cut on p. 29, in which the bartering at the pawnshop, and the indignities offered to the sacred wafer, tell the story of the play by means of its two most prominent scenes.

Of the literary value of the 'Rappresentazioni' it is not possible to speak with much enthusiasm. From a literary standpoint, indeed, the lives of the Saints, with which most of them have to do, are a difficult and not very promising subject. Most stories of heroism are best told in ten lines at longest; and to attempt to spin them out into several hundred, without any considerable material in the way of authentic detail, leads inevitably to weakness and exaggeration. In this respect the 'Rappresentazioni' are neither much worse nor much better than the average 'Legenda Sanctorum' in verse or prose.

FROM ANTONIA PULCI'S 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. FRANCESCO,' S.A.

They follow these, in fact, with remarkable fidelity, and as they are written for the most part in the familiar octava rima, it is only by the speeches being made in the first person, instead of in historical narration, that they differ very greatly from them. Thus, to take the plays from which we have chosen our illustrations, that of S. Francis of Assisi, by Antonia Pulci, faithfully records all the main incidents as told in the legends—the colloquy with the beggar during which he was stricken with compunction, the theft from his father of money to repair a church, the founding of his Order, the conference with the Pope, and the reception of the stigmata; this last being, as might be expected, the subject chosen by the artist for the woodcut on the title. The play of 'San Lorenzo' shows us the martyrdom of Pope Sixtus in the Decian persecution, and then the torture and death of S. Laurence for his refusal to surrender the treasure which the Pope had bequeathed to the poor of the church. Both of the woodcuts to these two plays are of great beauty. The first probably follows the traditions of the many pictures on the subject rather than that of the stage, though it was, no doubt, for a scene like this that the stage-managers of the day used their utmost resources. In the martyrdom of S. Laurence, on the other hand, we may be sure that we have a very exact picture of the scene as played on some convent stage.

FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. LORENZO,' S.A.

Both these plays belong to the fifteenth century, and, as is mostly the case in the earliest editions, have only a rough woodcut each. This was not invariably so, as in the Bodleian Library there are copies of editions of the plays of 'Stella' and 'S. Paulino,' which have every appearance of having been printed before 1500, but yet have sets of several cuts, all obviously designed especially for them. These, however, are exceptions; and as a rule where we find several cuts, it is easy to trace most of them back, either to other plays, or to other illustrated books of the time, such as the 'Epistole e Evangelii,' the 'Fior di Virtù,' Pulci's 'Morgante Maggiore,' etc. Thus, of the two cuts given here as illustrations to the curious 'Rappresentazione d'uno miracolo del corpo di Gesù,' the first alone occurs in the fifteenth-century edition, while in that of 1555 (probably sixty years later) this original cut reappears, with three others added to it. The first, here shown, representing a drinking scene, is borrowed, I strongly suspect, from the 'Morgante Maggiore'; while the second, which shows a man being burnt, and the third, in which a king is consulting his counsel, may be called stock-pictures, and reappear with frequency.

FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE D'UNO MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI GESÙ,' 1555

This play of the 'Corpo di Gesù' is an Italian version of a miracle which was constantly being reported during the middle-ages, and was often the excuse for a cruel persecution of the Jews. The well-known 'Croxton' 'Play of the Sacrament,' is cast on the same lines, and a detailed comparison of the two would yield some points of interest. In the 'Rappresentazione' the story is well told, and with unusual vivacity. After the angelic prologue there is an induction, in which a miracle of a consecrated wafer, dripping blood, is announced to Pope Urban, who discourses on it with a cardinal and with S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Bonaventura. The play itself begins with a drinking scene, in which a wicked Guglielmo squanders his money, and then takes his wife's cloak to the Jewish pawnshop to get more. The poor woman goes herself to the Jew to try to get her cloak back, and is then persuaded to filch a wafer at mass and bring it to the Jew, on his promise to restore her garment. Her horror at his proposal is overcome by the pretext that his object is to use the Host as a charm to heal his sick son, and that if this succeeds he and all his family will become Christians. This, of course, is a mere fiction, but it serves the woman in good stead; for when the Jew is discovered by the unquenchable flow of blood from the wafer he maltreats, he is promptly burnt, while the Judge is warned by a special revelation to spare the life of his accomplice, whose guilt might easily be represented as the greater of the two.

FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE D'UNO MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI GESÙ,' S.A.

An edition of the play of 'S. Cecilia,' probably printed about 1560, affords a good example of the gradual addition of cuts in later reprints. This little tract of about twenty pages has no fewer than eighteen pictures in it, three of which, however, are only repetitions of one of the most familiar cuts in the whole series of 'Rappresentazioni'—a Christian virgin dragged before a king; while three other well-worn cuts are each repeated twice, so that the number of blocks used was only thirteen, though these yielded eighteen impressions. As might be expected, the little pictures are often dragged in with very little appropriateness. Thus, the Roman soldiers sent to arrest Cecilia gave the publisher an excuse to show a party of knights riding in the country, and so on. On the other hand, the pleasant picture of a disputation here shown, though undoubtedly executed in the first instance for some other work, probably gives us a very correct representation of the costume and grouping of the actors.

FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. CECILIA,' S.A.

One point in the text of the 'S. Cecilia,' deserves noting. In the main it resembles very closely indeed the legend as it is known to lovers of English poetry from the version which Chaucer made in his early days and afterwards inserted, with little revision, into the 'Canterbury Tales.' But when Cecilia has gone through the form of marriage with the husband who is forced upon her, and is proceeding with him to his home, the lads of the neighbourhood bar their passage with a demand for petty gifts, to which the virgin submits with good grace—a fragment of Florentine life thus cropping up amid the rather unreal atmosphere of the old legend.

Whatever the shortcomings of the 'Rappresentazioni,' their popularity was very great, and they were reprinted again and again throughout the sixteenth century. Naturally the woodcuts suffered from continual use, and the stock-subjects, like that of a general martyrdom shown on page 10, are often found in the later editions with their little frames or borders almost knocked to pieces. Recutting was also frequent, and in the same edition of the play of S. Mary Magdalene, from which, for the sake of the unusual freedom in the handling, I have taken the title-cut as one of our illustrations, this is repeated later on from a new block, clumsily cut in imitation of the old one.

FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI SANTA MARIA MADDALENA,' S.A.

As the 'Rappresentazioni' and their illustrations are connected with the Savonarola tracts on the one hand, so on the other we find them influencing some less dramatic forms of literature. Thus, among the early Florentine illustrated books we find a number of 'Contrasti'—the contrast of men and women, of the living and the dead, of riches and poverty, etc. These were rather poems than plays, but the name 'Rappresentazione' is sometimes applied to them in later editions. This is so, for instance, with the famous 'Contrasto di Carnesciale e la Quaresima,' from which the first of the two cuts is here given, the second representing a visit to the fish and vegetable market for Lenten fare when the days of Carnival are over.

FROM THE 'CONTRASTO DI CARNEVALE E QUARESIMA,' S.A.

FROM ANGELO POLITIANO'S 'GIOSTRA DI GIULIANO DE' MEDICI,' S.A.

Again we find the same methods of illustration applied to the 'Giostre' of Giuliano and Lorenzo de'Medici, the story of Orpheus, by Angelo Politiano, which forms part of the former, being adorned with no fewer than ten admirable woodcuts, of which the picture here reproduced, of Orpheus frightened by a fury from attempting a second time to visit Hell in quest of his lost Eurydice, is quite one of the finest. The same methods of illustration were also used in the 'novelle,' including the 'Storia di due amanti' of Pope Pius II., from which we take our last illustration, and other secular chapbooks, which have nothing either religious or dramatic about them. It is clear, however, that the religious use was the earlier of the two, and that while the writers of the 'Laude' anticipated the practice of later revivalists in turning profane songs and tunes into hymns of devotion, it was the secular literature which was the borrower in the matter of illustrations.

FROM ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI'S 'STORIA DI DUE AMANTI,' S.A.

As to the authors of these charming woodcuts we know absolutely nothing. Dr. Paul Kristeller has lately attempted to trace out three or four distinctive schools of style in them, but no name of any artist can be connected with them; and we can only conjecture that there were one or two special workshops in Florence where they were designed and executed, and that printers and publishers applied to these workshops when they were in need of cuts.

[TWO ILLUSTRATED ITALIAN BIBLES][2]

FROM AN ITALIAN BIBLE. VENICE, 1493

THE search for old books has been so assiduous of late years that no little surprise was felt when it was announced in 1900 that two copies had been found, almost simultaneously, of a handsomely illustrated folio edition of the Italian Bible of Niccolo Malermi, printed at Venice in 1493, and similar to but quite distinct from the illustrated editions already known. A third copy has since been discovered, and this has been acquired by the British Museum, which since 1897 has also possessed the first of the editions with the original woodcuts, that printed in 1490 for Lucantonio Giunta. As both editions are very rare, and no comparison has yet been made between them, an attempt is here to be made to describe and contrast them.

The first edition of Malermi's Italian version of the Bible was printed by Jenson, who finished it on August 1st, 1470, apparently the same year in which the translator entered the monastery of S. Michele in Murano, near Venice, at the age of forty-eight. He was then stated to be 'natus quondam spectabilis et generosi viri domini Philippi de Malerbis, de Venetiis'; but nothing else is known of his family or early life, and the subsequent records only refer to his transfer from one monastery to another. Besides the Bible he also translated into Italian the lives of the saints from the 'Golden Legend' of Jacobus de Voragine, with additions of his own. This book also was printed for him by Jenson, and published in 1475.

Malermi's translation of the Bible was a great popular success, at least nine, and probably ten editions being printed during the fifteenth century, and the British Museum possessing six others issued in 1517, 1546, 1553, 1558, 1566, and 1567. By a curious chance another translation by an anonymous author must have been already in the press while Jenson was printing Malermi's first edition. It appeared exactly two months later, on October 1st, 1471, without the name of its printer, but in the types of Adam of Ammergau. That two rival translations of the Bible were thus among the first-fruits of the Italian press is one of the facts which Protestant controversialists are not apt to emphasise. It is possible, as Dr. Garnett, I think, has suggested, that Venice, which was wont to show great independence in its relations with the Papal Court, was the only city in Italy in which a vernacular Bible would have found a publisher. The earliest Italian Bible printed in any other Italian town does, indeed, appear to be one with Doré's illustrations, published at Milan at some date between 1866, when the illustrations first appeared in English and French Bibles, and 1880, when it attained a third edition. No doubt the Holy See had little enthusiasm for vernacular Bibles, and the Italian governments, which were more susceptible than Venice to the feeling of Rome, did nothing to encourage them. But discouragement, whether we approve of it or not (and the subsequent religious history of Europe shows that the Roman objection to unannotated vernacular texts was not wholly unfounded), is very different from prohibition, and next to the eighteen prae-Reformation German editions, the ten printed at Venice during the fifteenth century offer the most convincing proof that, except in the actual presence of heresy, vernacular translations enjoyed a practically unimpeded circulation long before the leaders of the Reformation made free access to the Scriptures one of their main demands. It is remarkable, indeed, that during the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Inquisition was tightening its hold on Venice, and the 'Index Librorum Prohibitorum' had come into being, the Italian Bibles printed there increased notably. The British Museum possesses five editions of Malermi's version published in the twenty-two years 1546-1567, six of Brucioli's published in the twenty years 1532-1551, two of Santi Marmochino's, printed respectively in 1538 and 1545, a total of thirteen editions published within thirty-six years, now on the shelves of a single library. After 1567 there is another tale to tell. Until the Milan edition already mentioned, Geneva, Nuremberg, Leipsic and London are the only imprints to be found on Italian editions of the complete Bible. In the face of what she considered heretical interpretations, the Church of Rome would no longer trust her people with vernacular Bibles; but it is one of the small services which Bibliography can render to History to note that this had not been her policy so long as the Scriptures were desired for edification and not for controversy, and the popularity of the Malermi Bible is so decisive a proof of this that it would be unfair to leave it unmentioned.

The main object of this article is far removed from the weighty question of religious policy on which we have incidentally touched. The first edition of the Malermi Bible is a very rare book, and the British Museum, sad to say, possesses no copy of it. The only copy in England of which I know is in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, and this possesses six coloured illustrations representing the six days of Creation, the colouring being so heavy as nearly, though not quite, to obscure the fact that it is imposed upon woodcuts.

In the years 1470-1472 there are fairly numerous examples of woodcut borders and initials being used in books printed at Venice, not as substantive decorations in themselves, but as outlines for the guidance of illuminators. We may probably take it that the six designs in the first Malermi Bible, which do not seem to occur in all copies, were of this character, and were not intended to stand by themselves. The first Venetian woodcuts not intended to be coloured are found in books printed by Erhard Ratdolt, and their use spread very slowly until nearly 1490. Thus the Malermi Bibles of 1477, 1481, 1484, and 1487 are all innocent of woodcuts, though there are blank leaves and spaces left in some of them, which may have been intended for illumination.

S. JEROME. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, GIUNTA, 1490

There seems to have been a project of making the 'Biblia cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra,' published by Octavianus Scotus in 1489, into a handsome illustrated book; but if this was so the project was soon abandoned, as the illustrations come in little patches at different points at which the book may have been put in hand on different presses, and between these points there are long stretches without any pictures at all. Thus not only the first Italian Bible, but the first Bible printed in Italy in which illustrations form an important feature, is the edition of Malermi's version printed in October 1490, by Giovanni Ragazzo for Lucantonio Giunta. If long delayed, this was a fine enough book to be worth waiting for. It is in double columns, measuring 250×76 mm. apiece, and each containing sixty-one lines of a respectably round type about the size of pica. For convenience of printing rather than of binding it is divided into two parts (the second beginning with the Book of Proverbs), which are always, as far as I know, found united in a single volume. Part I. contains: (i.) a frontispiece made up (within a border) of six cuts measuring 56×57 mm. each, representing the six days of Creation, obviously influenced by the illumination with underlying woodcuts of the 1471 edition; (ii.) a pictorial initial N for the 'Nel principio' of Genesis; (iii.) 208 small woodcuts or vignettes, measuring about 45×75 mm., of which 199 are different and 9 are repetitions. Part II. contains a large picture and border for the opening chapter of Proverbs, and 175 small cuts, of which 166 are different and 9 are repetitions. Deducting the repeats, but counting the initial and each of the Creation woodcuts separately, we have thus a grand total of 373 different designs, almost all of them well drawn, though many have been sadly mangled by the wood-cutter.

AN AUTHOR AT WORK. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, GIUNTA, 1490

It is to the credit of the Venetian public that Giunta's edition of this big book sold quickly. For reasons hereafter to be given I think it possible that a reprint with some additional cuts was published as early as 1491. We know for certain that a new edition (printed again by Giovanni Ragazzo) was ready for sale in July 1492. Like most reprints of illustrated books this aimed at an appearance of greater liberality at a comparatively small expense. Thus in the book Genesis there are 27 woodcuts in 1492 against 16 in 1490, a too realistic picture of Potiphar's wife tempting Joseph being judiciously omitted, while twelve new subjects are added. In Exodus we have 29 cuts against 25, four new ones being added, while on the other hand the representations of the Burning Bush (in which a dog is shown barking at the Almighty) and of the Slaying of the Firstborn are withdrawn and replaced without appropriateness by cuts taken from Deuteronomy ix. and Leviticus x. In Leviticus one cut (that to chap. vii.) is changed and a new one added to chap. xviii. In Numbers an illustration of the zeal of Phineas in chap. xxv. is omitted, and two new cuts added to chaps. xxix. and xxxiii.; in Deuteronomy we have six new cuts and a repeat. To these 26 additions (against two omissions) in the Pentateuch, we have to add 14 more (against one repeat omitted) from Joshua to Kings. From Chronicles to Acts the woodcuts in the two editions are substantially the same, six cuts being changed, while one is omitted. In the Epistles, besides two changes, there are 12 additions, but these are mostly either repeats or taken from other books. In the Apocalypse and the Life of S. Joseph, with which the book ends, the illustrations in the two editions agree. The number of different cuts (deducting 12 and 9 respectively for repetitions) is 240 in Part I. and 178 in Part II., or a total of 418 different cuts against 373 in the 1490 edition, the increase being practically confined to the books Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and the Epistles.

S. JEROME. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, 'ANIMA MIA,' 1493

Turning now to the 'Anima Mia' edition of 1493, three copies of which have recently come to light after its existence had remained unsuspected for generations, we have only to place it side by side with one of the Giunta texts to find that it is a not too scrupulous attempt to cut into the profits of the firm which was first in the field. The worst evil of the publishing trade at the present day is that if one publisher strikes out a new line, whether in the form of his books, or the prices at which they are issued, or by bringing into notice some hitherto neglected author or subject, one or more of his competitors immediately tries to put similar editions on the market, and to offer purchasers a little more for their money. The result is that the first publisher finds his profits sensibly diminished, while the second very probably burns his fingers.

AN AUTHOR AT WORK. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, 'ANIMA MIA,' 1493

Few modern publishers, however, would plagiarise quite as freely as did 'Anima Mia' in his new Bible. Not only did he copy Giunta closely in the form and size of his book, the arrangement of the page and the size of the illustrations; but in a great number of cases he allowed his artists to take precisely the same subjects for illustration, and even to copy the designs themselves quite closely, sometimes by the lazy method which, by imitating the model on the block of wood, without first reversing it, caused the printed picture itself to appear in reverse.

JOSHUA AND THE GIBEONITES. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, GIUNTA, 1490

A curious question now arises as to which of the Giunta editions 'Anima Mia' elected to copy from. That of 1490 was clearly not the one chosen, since among 'Anima Mia's' pictures we find illustrations to Genesis xiii., xv., xvii., xx., xxiv., and xxvi., none of which were illustrated in the 1490 edition, while pictures on the same subjects are found in that of 1492. Again, in the four books of Kings the 1493 edition agrees with the 1492 in having forty-nine cuts as against forty-three in the original edition of 1490. More conclusive still is the evidence of a mistake in Joshua ix., where it is impossible that the artist can have had before him the pretty little cut of the Gibeonites as hewers of wood and drawers of water, which is one of our illustrations.

'EXCEPT THE LORD BUILD THE HOUSE.' FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, 'ANIMA MIA,' 1493

By 1492 the block for this had apparently been damaged and is replaced by a larger cut (56 mm. in height), representing a king and two councillors, apparently taken from some other book. The 1493 illustrator was clearly puzzled by this, and for lack of anything better repeated a cut of Moses and Miriam from Exodus. Clearly he had not in this case the 1490 edition before him. But neither am I at all sure that he had that of 1492. While he copies six of the new pictures in Genesis he omits six others; in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy he agrees with the 1490 edition against that of 1492; in Judges, Ruth, and Kings, with 1492 as against 1490; in Genesis, Leviticus, and Joshua, partly with one, partly with the other. In two other cases he steers a middle course. The 1490 artist had illustrated far too realistically both the temptation of Joseph and the sin which called forth the zeal of Phineas. In the 1492 edition these subjects are very wisely omitted. In that of 1493 they appear, but in a modified form. My own theory to account for these discrepancies is that between 1490 and 1492—presumably in 1491—Giunta published yet another issue of the Bible, adding a few illustrations, but not so many as in 1492, and substituting two new cuts of the subjects unpleasantly illustrated in 1490, which he subsequently thought well to pass over altogether. Such an intermediate edition would supply a model which would explain all the early illustrations in the edition of 1493, and would also allow a more reasonable time to 'Anima Mia' to get them made, and his book printed, than the nine months which separate the editions of July 1492, and April 1493. 'Anima Mia,' however, was by no means wholly a plagiarist, as is proved by the fact that while in his first volume the 236 illustrations stand midways numerically between the 215 and the 252 of the two Giunta editions of 1490 and 1492; for his second volume he provided no fewer than 208 against the 176 and 187 of his predecessors, the new cuts being fairly evenly distributed through the different books, while their artistic merit is of average quality.

'THE FOOL HATH SAID IN HIS HEART.' FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, GIUNTA, 1490

It is by this touchstone of artistic merit, and not by considerations of quantity that the comparative claims of the two rival editions must be decided; and on the whole there can be no doubt that both for originality of design and for the highest merit in execution the palm must be given to the artists and craftsmen employed by Giunta. Unfortunately in both editions large numbers of the woodcuts were intrusted to cutters quite incompetent to deal with such delicate work. Giunta's illustrations to the Gospels are quite painfully bad, while those of 'Anima Mia' are here only mediocre, his worst craftsman having been employed on some of the middle books of the Old Testament. His worst work is almost as bad as the worst of Giunta's, though less painful, as not introducing the figure of Christ. The proportion of mediocre cuts is far greater, and of these we give (p. 46) a generously chosen example in that prefixed to Psalm lii. It should really be an illustration, it may be imagined, to the text, 'Except the Lord build the house their labour is but vain that build it,' but in any case it is strikingly inferior to the brilliant cut in the 1490 edition, which illustrates the heading 'Dixit insipiens' with all possible cogency.

THE ENTRY INTO THE ARK. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, 'ANIMA MIA,' 1493

Lastly, his best work, though really good, is not so good as that of his predecessor. One reason for this is, no doubt, that part of the space available in the column was occupied by the little border-pieces which, though offering a pleasing setting to the pictures, diminish the space available for illustration by nearly a quarter. The effect of this is especially noticeable when the 1493 artist is copying his predecessor, the necessity for 'selection' sometimes leading to the omission of important parts of the composition. But at the outset of both volumes, before the work began to be hurried, there is plenty of originality, and excellent use is made of the space at the designer's disposal. The cut of the animals entering the ark here shown is delightful, and in that of Jacob deceiving Isaac we seem to feel instinctively the blindness of the old man, who stretches out his hand to feel for the dish his false son is bringing him. As the 1493 edition is so little known compared with that of 1490, both our remaining illustrations are taken from it. The first, the frontispiece to the second volume, shown at the beginning of this article, compares very favourably with the similar design in the earlier edition. The second, the picture of S. Jerome in the Desert, is one of the best things in the book, both in design and cutting; but it differs from everything else in it, and may possibly belong to some other set.

JACOB DECEIVING ISAAC. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, 'ANIMA MIA,' 1493

It may have been noted that in writing of the edition of 1490 I have not thought it necessary to write of the various theories which have been built on the little letter 'b' with which many of the cuts are signed, e.g., that of 'an author at work' reproduced on p. 42. It is now generally acknowledged that it is the mark, not of any designer, nor even perhaps of any individual woodcutter, but merely of the workshop in which the little blocks were cut.

S. JEROME IN THE DESERT. FROM THE MALERMI BIBLE. VENICE, 'ANIMA MIA,' 1493

[A BOOK OF HOURS][3]

SOME years ago a copy of an edition of the 'Hours of the Blessed Virgin,' according to the use of Sarum, came into my possession, and I have since been surprised to learn that it is probably unique. On the fly-leaf of the little volume is the note: 'This Book I picked up on a Stall at Venice, in 1741, and had it bound there. It was probably printed in England (as there are some few English directions in it) some time before Henry VIII.' The second half of this note has been crossed through, and the more correct information substituted: 'rather at Paris for the use of English booksellers, about the year 1500.' A later note shows that the original purchaser was Mr. Joseph Smith, for many years British Consul at Venice, most of whose many bargains in early printed books passed into the library of George III., and thence to the British Museum. Of this little 'Book of Hours' many of the pages are stained with damp, so that it probably belonged to the consignment of his purchases which was wrecked on its way home. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because the most esteemed Horae are on vellum and this is on paper and moreover lacks its first leaf, perhaps because the good king did not care to collect works of prae-Reformation devotion, this particular purchase of the energetic consul never found a royal owner. It possesses, however, not a little interest of its own, and if my readers will consent to turn over its pages with me, they will disclose to us a great deal of information as to the compilation and printing of these books of devotion in the fifteenth century, and their supply for the use of devout persons in England.

It is rather surprising that Consul Smith was deceived, even for a moment, as to the foreign origin of his purchase. The illustrations, as to which we shall have a great deal to say later on, are unmistakably French, and appear in many French 'Books of Hours,' both of earlier and later date. The type also is of a character very common in French books, and never found out of France. These points, however, require just a smattering of knowledge about early printing for their appreciation, while only a little common sense is needed in the present case to determine the origin of the book. The general printing is excellent, but the mistakes made in the half-dozen directions in English could have been made by no Englishman. Thus the words into the chirche appear as in thothe chir che; hous is misprinted bous; begynne as hegynne; and the like. Moreover, we note that the printer possessed no letter k in his fount, but was obliged to represent it by a combination of l and the old sign for and:

The book, therefore, was printed neither in England, Germany, nor the Low Countries, but in a country where the letter k forms no part of the alphabet, and a good guess might easily have suggested France as its most likely place of imprint.

A clause in one of the Acts passed by the Parliament of 1483, while Richard III. was still anxious to pose as a constitutional monarch, expressly provided for the free importation of books printed abroad, and for the exemption of foreign printers and booksellers settling in England from the restrictions usually imposed upon alien traders. The clause was no doubt prompted by a genuine desire to promote education and learning, but it is probable that a little protection of a young industry might have quickened its development without imposing too serious a tax upon reading. Lettou and Machlinia were already at work in London when the Act was passed, and Theodoric Rood at Oxford, but no other printers were attracted from abroad for several years, while the influx of foreign books made home competition so hazardous that after Rood disappears Oxford was for many years without a printer, and at Cambridge no press was set up till 1521. Not only were almost all classical books imported, but English works were printed in English by several Dutch firms, the much greater similarity of the two languages in those days rendering the task easier than it would be at present. English books were also printed occasionally in France, for Antoine Vérard among others, not always, however, very intelligently, as indeed the misprints at which we have just been looking would lead us to expect.

In addition to the works of poetry and romance, which are now the best known among the productions of his press, William Caxton issued also many books of devotion. In the show-case devoted to his publications in the King's Library at the British Museum, among other unique books are shown the Latin Psalter, printed by him between 1480 and 1483, and a volume containing the 'Fifteen Oes,' and other prayers, 'emprented bi the commaundementes of the most hye and vertuous pryncesse our liege ladi Elizabeth by the grace of God Quene of Englonde,' and of Margaret Tudor, the king's mother.

THE TREE OF JESSE. FROM PIGOUCHET'S 'HORAE'

Caxton also printed at least four editions of the Horae, fragments of which survive at the Museum and at Oxford, though no copy even approaching completeness is now known to exist. As a rule, however, English liturgical works were printed abroad, for the most part in France (at Paris or Rouen), but also at Venice, at Antwerp, at Basel, and elsewhere. Thus of the Sarum Breviary there are at the Museum six early Paris editions, and one from Antwerp, but no London edition before 1541. The solitary editions of the Sarum Gradual and Antiphonal are both from Paris, while of the thirty editions of the Sarum Missal, five and twenty were printed abroad and only five at home. It need not, therefore, surprise us to find that of thirty-nine Sarum Horae in the Museum library, while two were printed at Antwerp, and two at Rouen, the Paris presses produced twenty-seven, those of London only eight, and these with some help from France.

It is time now to turn to the contents of our book. These are as follows:—

There is thus, as in all editions, a great deal in the volume besides the Horae, from which the book takes its name. But of the hundred and sixty pages to which (in addition to the twelve leaves of Kalendar) the volume extends, upwards of sixty are occupied by the Hours, which are thus much the most important item in the contents. The antiquity of these Hours was very great, for they are mentioned as an office as early as the sixth century. They fell, however, into disuse, but were revived, and probably rearranged, by Peter Damian just ten years before our battle of Hastings. Forty years later, in 1096, at the Council of Claremont, the saying of them, in addition to the canonical hours, was made compulsory upon all the clergy, and this compulsion continued until 1568, when Pope Pius V., in issuing his revision of the Breviary, released the clergy from the obligation to say this office, at the same time that he forbade the use of the vernacular translations of it, which for at least two centuries had been permitted to the laity. In England, as we all know, these vernacular versions were called Primers, and their rendering of the Psalms and Prayers of which the Hours were made up, and of the additional matter which was joined with them, has formed the basis of our present English Prayer Book.

Thee God we preise: Thee Lord we knowleche:

Thee endless Fader everi erthe worschipeth:

To Thee alle angels, to Thee hevenes and alle manere powers:

To thee cherubim and seraphim crieth with vois withouten cessinge:

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Ostis:

Hevenes and erthe ben ful of mageste of thi glorie:

Thee the glorious compainie of apostles:

Thee the preisable noumbre of prophetes:

Thee preiseth the white ost of martires.

So began the English version of the Te Deum in a Primer written at the end of the fourteenth century (British Museum, Add. MS. 27, 592),[4] and if the beauty of some of these lines has caused us to give them a preference over other versions a little closer to our own, they serve none the less well to show whence it was that our Prayer Book obtained its magnificent rhythms. But who would know more of our old English Primers must be referred to the third volume of the late Mr. Maskell's 'Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae' (Clarendon Press, 1882). Here we are concerned with Horae, and that in their bibliographical and pictorial, rather than their liturgical aspect.

Each of the Hours, we are told, had its mystical reference to some event in the Lives of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord, and these references are explained in some of the Primers in some rude verses, which, with correction of some obvious misprints, and modernising the spelling, I proceed to quote:—

Ad Laudes:

How Mary, the mother and virgin,

Visited Elizabeth, wife of Zachary,

Which said, 'Blessed be thou cousin,

And blessed be the fruit of thy body.'

Ad Primam:

How Jesu Christ right poorly born was,

In an old crib laid all in poverty,

At Bethleem, by an ox and an ass,

Where Mary blessed His nativity.

Ad Tertiam:

How an Angel appeared in the morn,

Singing, 'Gloria in Excelsis Deo';

Saying, 'The very Son of God is born,

Ye Shepherds of Bethleem, ye may go.'

Ad Sextam:

How three kings of strange nations,

Of Christ's birth having intelligence,

Unto Bethleem brought their oblations,

Of gold, of myrrh, and frankincense.

Ad Nonam:

Simeon, at Christ's circumcision,

These words unto the Jews did tell,

'My eyen beholdeth your redemption,

The light and glory of Israel.'

Ad Vesperas:

How Mary and Joseph with Jesus were fain

Into Egypt, for succour, to flee,

Whan the Innocents for His sake were slain,

By commission of Herod's cruelty.

Ad Completorium:

How Mary assumpted was above the skies,

By her Son as sovereign lady,

Received there among the hierarchies,

And crowned her the queen of glory.

I have quoted these verses in full, rude though they are, because they form the keynote to the scheme of illustrations of all Horae and Primers. The Hours were intended as devotional comments on the subjects of these verses, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was thus the most natural thing in the world that each Hour should be accompanied by an illumination, or, failing that, a woodcut, to illustrate its special theme. Accustomed as we nowadays are to gain our information exclusively by reading letterpress, it is only by a visit to our nurseries that we can recall to ourselves how deeply the need of pictures was felt in the ages before the printing press made the art of reading a common acquirement. Of this need the Miracle Plays, with all their rudeness, all their unconscious profanity, were at once the living witness and the living fulfilment. In the great cycles, such as those of York, Wakefield, and Chester, which have come down to us, the history of the world in its sacred aspects is unrolled from the creation of the angels to the day of judgment; and the presentment of these plays probably brought the Bible stories nearer to the people than could have been possible in any other way. Certainly these plays left a deep mark upon current ideas of art, and helped to render impossible any attempt at antiquarian correctness. In the scene of the Adoration of the Shepherds in some of the finest books of Hours (P. Pigouchet: Paris, 1498, 1502, etc.), underneath the figures of the shepherds and their wives (by whom they are mostly represented as being accompanied) are written the names Gobin le gai, le beau Roger, Aloris, Alison, Mahault, Ysambre, by which they were known in the French plays on the Nativity, and the shepherds are French Shepherds of the fifteenth century. But however great their anachronisms, the tableaux in the Miracle Plays and the pictures in books of devotion were found abundantly helpful, and for more than a century and a half, first in manuscript and afterwards in print, the Horae or Primers, the prayer-books of the laity, hold the first place among illuminated books.

FROM A SARUM HORAE. PARIS: P. PIGOUCHET FOR S. VOSTRE, 1502

A few years ago Mr. Quaritch possessed a charming 'Book of Hours,' which at one time belonged to Elizabeth Poyntz, a relative of the Thomas Poyntz at whose book we were looking a little while back. To this manuscript Mr. Quaritch in his catalogue assigned the date 'about 1360,' which, if correct, gives it considerable antiquity among illuminated Horae. The end of the fourteenth century is the date at which these first become at all common, and it was during the fifteenth century that they obtained their greatest popularity, and that the greatest artists were employed in their production. Numerous and very beautiful examples of the manuscripts produced during this period form part of the permanent exhibition in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, and I hope that many of my readers will go to look at them there. All fine examples of manuscript Horae possess (i.) beautiful initial letters, (ii.) borders surrounding every page, formed of leaves, flowers, birds, grotesques, and the like, (iii.) a number of beautiful miniatures, filling the whole or the greater part of a page, and representing the scenes from the life of Christ and His Mother mentioned in the lines quoted above, with additional illustrations from the Passion, and from the lives of the saints. Beyond saying this, it is impossible to give any general description of these manuscript Hours, each one of which possesses its own delightful individuality. Two or three special examples, however, may be mentioned to show the estimation in which they were held and the care which was spent on their decoration. Thus the late Mr. Charles Elton possessed a charming little 'Book of Hours' which once belonged to Queen Jeanne II. of Naples (1370-1435). It measures only 2 5/8 × 1 7/8 inches, and contains one hundred and sixty leaves and twenty miniatures, nine of which occupy the whole of their page. The initial letters throughout are in gold and colours, and the borders are of the ivy-leaf pattern, the scrolls often terminating in grotesques. Mr. Quaritch, again, when this paper was written, had for disposal (for the sum of one thousand pounds) a Horae of slightly later date, a wedding present from the Regent, John, Duke of Bedford, to Lord Talbot on his second marriage in 1424, when he allied himself to Margaret Beauchamp, daughter of Richard, Earl of Warwick. The first leaf contains a miniature showing Talbot and his wife at prayer under the protection of their patron saints, and many other miniatures are scattered through the rest of the volume. In 1429 Talbot was captured at the battle of Patay and remained a prisoner in France till 1433. During this time he made many entries in the blank leaves of his Hours. Here is a snatch from one in verse:

Saynt George the gode knyght

Over your Fomen geve you myght,

And holy Saynt Katheryne

To youre begynnyng send gode fyne,

Saynt Christofre botefull (helpful) on see and lond,

Joyfully make you see Engelond.

Twenty years after his release from imprisonment, Talbot was slain (July 20, 1453), fighting against a Breton force at Chatillon. It is possible that he may have carried his Hours on his person, for it was in the cottage of a Breton peasant that it was discovered a few years ago, and it seems likely that a Breton soldier may have found it on the battle-field, and transmitted it to his descendants as an heirloom. As an example of another kind of interest, we may instance a Horae at the Bodleian, on four of whose leaves are drawn most delicate and beautiful representations of religious processions. The best of these has been reproduced in the Proceedings of the Palæographical Society, and it is impossible to overrate the charm of the drawing.

In 1473 Nicholas Jenson printed a Horae at Venice; three years later, Matthias Moravus followed his example at Naples, and the earliest of Caxton's four editions was probably printed not much later than 1478. But these were all ordinary books, with no special beauty about them except what they might receive from the 'rubrisher,' or illuminator, after the printer had done his work. It was not till 1487, just a third of a century after the issue from the press of the first printed document bearing a date, that any serious attempt was made to supplant the manuscript Horae by printed editions. The first essay was made by Anthoine Vérard, of Paris, and is said—I have never seen a copy of it—to have been a poor production, 'without frontispieces' (whatever that may mean), or borders to the text. The success, however, with which it met was apparently sufficient to encourage Vérard to renew his attempt, and in 1488 or thereabouts he issued his 'Grandes Heures,' a fine quarto, with fourteen large engravings, and borders in four compartments to every page. In 1489, he reprinted the book in much cheaper form, using most of the large engravings which now occupied a whole page apiece, and devising for the borders smaller figures, in which scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord were set forth with their Old Testament types. Meanwhile other publishers had not been idle, for, in 1488, Jean du Pré, or Johannes de Prato, as he called himself on his Latin title-pages, issued the first of the few Horae which proceeded from his press; and in 1491 Philippe Pigouchet printed his first known edition, and not long afterwards entered into relations with Simon Vostre, an enterprising bookseller, which resulted in the publication of at least a score of editions, all extraordinarily rare, during the next twenty years. Towards the end of this century, and in the early part of the next, other Paris firms of printers and publishers joined in the trade. Of these, Thielman Kerver, Gilles and Germain Hardouyn, Guillaume Eustace, Francois Regnault, and Geoffroy Tory were the most important, but Horae are extant bearing the imprint of more than thirty other firms besides these. The demand must have been very great, for Paris supplied not only the rest of France—and in the British Museum there are examples of Horae for the use of no fewer than thirty different French dioceses—but also England. Hence there was abundance of work for all, and the different publishers copied each other's editions with a freedom which is not a little embarrassing to the humble bibliographer.

The subjects of the fourteen full-page illustrations in the little 'Horae secundum usum Sarum,' which we have taken as our text, are as follows:-

These, with the exception of the last, which is not quite so common, occur in most Horae. Other illustrations, which are frequently found, especially in earlier editions, represent scenes from the life of David in connection with the Penitential Psalms, his gazing at Bathsheba, the consummation of his plan for the murder of Uriah, and his punishment. His victory over Goliath is also occasionally represented. We also find in several early editions 'Les Trois Vifs' placed over against 'Les Trois Morts,' three gay knights on one page and three grinning skeletons on another, and in Tory's 'Heures à l'usage de Paris' of 1527 we have a striking picture of Death, on his black horse, riding over the corpses of his victims to deliver yet another summons. The Calendar, again, is usually prefaced by a figure of a man, with all the organs of his body exposed, and lines drawn from them to the celestial bodies, which, in the popular beliefs, were supposed to influence their health and sickness. Of all these illustrations five or six different varieties are found; but from 1495 to the end of the century, the set of designs which was used for our little Sarum Horae was by far the most popular, and influenced the editions of all the leading publishers.

FROM TORY'S 'HORAE.' PARIS, 1525

To trace the history of these border-pieces would require a separate article. Jean du Pré, Vérard, and Pigouchet, made several experiments in smaller Horae with designs of flowers and birds for borders; but the popular taste decided in favour of allegorical and historical figures, and these were soon multiplied to such an extent that their original order and significance were lost sight of. In the editions published by Jean du Pré in 1488, and by Vérard in 1489, several pages are occupied with an explanation of the small figures in the border. Jesse and Balaam are shown as types of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the betrothal of Isaac and Rebecca as a type of her Espousal, Eve tempted by the Serpent shows the Fall to which the Annunciation preluded the remedy, the Burning Bush and Aaron's rod foreshadowed the Nativity. Here all is clear, but as the demand for variety increased, there were added, in addition to the 'Dance of Death,' figures of the Saints, Prophets, Angels, and Virtues, representations of the Sibyls, emblems of the Fifteen Signs of Coming Judgment, and scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord, and from the Old Testament.

FROM TORY'S 'HORAE.' PARIS, 1527

Partly for convenience of printing, but more, we may imagine, for the sake of producing an appearance of endless variety, these border-pieces were not cut in a single block, but were detachable, so that they could be used in different combinations. In several editions, even in one of that very scholarly and artistic printer Geoffroy Tory, this is effected at the cost of suggesting that the block had been accidentally broken, as in the page already shown from his edition of 1527, where at the foot the pieces do not even fit together. The more general plan, however, was that exemplified in Tory's edition of 1525, where it is carried out with unusual precision, the borders being built up by the repetition of exactly sixteen blocks of each size, fitting respectively into the inner and outer margin and the head and foot of the page. In earlier editions the border-pieces are more numerous and not so mathematically apportioned, the reason being that while Tory's are purely decorative, and their number therefore fixed at will, in the earlier editions the cuts are pictorial, and their number decided by the exigencies of the subjects. Thus in Pigouchet's Paris 'Hours' of 1491 there are in all 147 border-pieces, of which 78 are outer side-pieces, 15 inner side-pieces, 16 cornices, 8 head-pieces, and 30 foot-pieces. The numbers illustrate the greater importance of the outer side-pieces and foot-pieces, which have a depth or breadth of twenty-one millimetres against the nine of the inner side-piece and head-piece. The subjects illustrated in them are the Creation, the Gospel history from the birth of the Blessed Virgin to the Last Judgment, and special sets of the Nativity and Passion with Old Testament types. All these were extensively imitated by other publishers, and the same honour was paid to the famous set of the Dance of Death, which Pigouchet began to introduce early in 1496, and gradually increased in successive editions till in that of 8th August 1497 we find the full number of ten triple blocks of male victims and twelve of women. A similar succession may be traced in the gradual changes in the full-page cuts, so that we can often tell within two or three months the time at which an undated edition was sent to press. In my own little book there are no large border-pieces, only ledges round the text, but from its containing the picture of the stem of Jesse (shown as one of our illustrations) and the Church Militant and Triumphant, it must be assigned to the year 1498 or a little later.

THE DANCE OF DEATH. FROM PIGOUCHET'S 'HORAE' OF 1498.

[THE TRANSFERENCE OF WOODCUTS IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES][5]

GRANOLLACHS' 'LUNARE.' FLORENCE: L. MORGIANI FOR P. PACINI, 1496. IMITATED FROM THE NAPLES EDITION OF 1485

DESPITE some efforts to prove the contrary, there can be little doubt that the art of taking clichés of woodcuts, or of cuts engraved on soft metal treated in the same way as wood, was quite unknown during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If one printer or publisher desired the use of a set of cuts in possession of another, it was open to him to try to borrow or buy them, and failing this to have them copied as best he could, on the theory of artistic copyright having as yet been broached. In the present paper, after a few words on the simpler processes of borrowing and buying, I propose to bring together some typical instances of the different methods in which cuts designed in one country or district were copied in another, and incidentally, perhaps, to throw a little new light on the relations of designers and woodcutters in these early days of book-illustration.

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.

Though the vagaries of fashion were thus slightly tempered at the great centres of printing in Italy, fashion interfered with the borrowing of blocks in another way in this country. Germany and France were each fairly homogeneous in art matters. We may trace different schools, but their differences are not very strongly marked, and their followers were probably not very keenly conscious of them. In Italy the artistic individuality of every district was clearly defined, and though, as we shall see, the printers of one town made free use of the illustrations in the books of those of another, there was scarcely any interchange of blocks. In the 'De Structura compositionis' of Ferrettus, printed at Forli in 1495, both of the two illustrations are of Venetian origin, that of Theseus and the Minotaur being taken from the 'Plutarch' of 1491, and that of the lecture-hall from the 'Epigrammata Cantalycii' of 1493. But this is an almost unique instance of direct borrowing, the rule being that while designs were freely imitated, they were, almost invariably, recast in the style of art of the district in which they were to appear.

FROM THE NAPLES EDITION OF THE 'ARTE DE ASTROLOGIA' OR 'LUNARE' OF GRANOLLACHS, FOR THE YEAR 1485. (REDUCED.)

Passing now from the purchase of woodcuts to their imitation, we may look, first of all, at the simplest and easiest form in which a design could be reproduced. The impression from a woodcut is, of course, a reversal of the design as it appears on the block, and an artist not very confident of his own skill would naturally shrink from the rather difficult task of copying the printed cut in reverse in order that his own sketch might print in the same way as its original. He preferred to copy the printed cut as he saw it before him, with the result that in the impressions from his copy everything is reversed, the right becoming left, and the left right. Thus simplified his task was easy, and it was even possible to avoid altogether the need of copying, by merely pasting the illustration on the block, and cutting the wood through the paper. When Antoine Vérard desired to bring out a French edition of the 'Metamorphoses,' his wood-cutters treated the designs in the edition by Colard Mansion in this way, and as the originals were but poor work the injury to them was not very great. It was the first of these designs, that of Saturn devouring his children, which Vérard, a year or two later, printed in his edition on vellum of the 'Miroir Historial' of Vincent de Beauvais, to serve as a ground-plan to his illuminator, who, by painting out Saturn's scythe, and the child in his mouth, and some other objectionable details, turned it into a very moderately edifying picture of the Holy Family. But this after-use is beside our point, nor are the cuts in either Mansion's edition, or that of Vérard, worth reproducing here. As an instance of this practice we will rather show the original and a copy in reverse of the frontispiece of the 'Nobilissima Arte de Astrologia,' by Granollachs, an astronomer of Barcelona, printed at Naples, with the calculations made for the year 1485, when it was presumably intended to be issued. That this is really its date we have strong confirmatory evidence in the style, both of the design and the cutting, which corresponds very closely to that of the cuts to the life of Æsop prefixed to the Italian edition brought out at Naples in the same year, 1485, by the jurist-publisher, Francisco de Tuppo, and probably printed for him by Matthias Moravus. The designer was a man of skill and imagination, and we may notice in this picture the Saracenic type which he has given to the man whom we see at the window, to suit with the presumably Moorish descent of its author.

FROM THE 'LUNARE' OF GRANOLLACHS FOR 1493. PRINTED AT ROME BY PLANNCK. REVERSED FROM THE NAPLES EDITION. (REDUCED.)

The 'Arte de Astrologia' of Granollachs became popular, and in 1493 Plannck, a great printer of cheap books at Rome, brought out an edition of it there under the altered title 'Lunare.' That it might not go unillustrated, he seems to have commissioned his office-boy to reproduce the Naples woodcut, and the result was the remarkable work of art which is here set face to face with its original. By and by we shall see how a Florentine artist fared when the same task was set him.

Reproduction in reverse was undoubtedly the refuge of the incompetent, but we must remember that it was also the restoration of the design as originally drawn on the wood, and the most skilful artists did not disdain to save themselves trouble in this way. They had no objection to copying another man's work, but their aim was not to see how closely they could copy, but to make a pretty picture with the least expenditure of pains, and if it looked as well when the rights and lefts were reversed there was no fault to be found. Hence we shall find this method employed in many cases where the second artist was no whit inferior to the first. Examples of the servile reproduction of woodcuts by other printers, without reversal, are hardly as numerous as we should expect, and are naturally not very interesting. They group themselves chiefly round a few popular books, such as the 'Fasciculus Temporum' of Rolewinck, Steinhowel's 'Æsop' and Brant's 'Ship of Fools.' The home of the 'Fasciculus Temporum' seems to have been Cologne, but the cuts in the editions which we find printed in other towns of Germany, at Venice by Walch and Ratdolt, and in Spain, all follow the same lines very closely. Of the 'Æsop,' which started either from Sorg's press at Augsburg, or from that of Knoblochzer at Strasburg, no less than eleven editions were printed in different towns in Germany during the fifteenth century, the cuts in all of which are on the same model, while the actual blocks used by Sorg afterwards passed into the possession of Gerard Leeu at Antwerp, and were again imitated by Christian Snellaert at Delft. The cuts in the 'Narrenschiff' enjoyed no less widespread a popularity.

A few single cuts, which from their subjects might be used as title-cuts to a great variety of books, also attracted the attention of the more pedestrian copyists. Thus in educational books printed in Germany towards the close of the fifteenth century there are a bewildering number of variants of a woodcut of a master and scholars with the legend 'Accipies tanti doctoris dogmata sancti,' and while a good many French cuts found their way into England on their original blocks others were copied for English use with the servility we should expect. Among the few instances of direct copying in Italy, one of the most noteworthy is the reproduction at the beginning of the 'Supplementum Chronicorum' of Foresti, printed by Bernardino de Benaliis at Venice in 1486, of the pictures of the Creation, the Fall, and the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, from the large Bible printed by Quentel at Cologne about six years earlier. On the other hand, in my monograph on 'Italian Book-Illustrations' (Portfolio, No. xii. Dec. 1894), I have already alluded to a curious instance of the direct copying of Italian ornamental initials by a German. In 1484, in a 'Boethius' printed by Oliverius Servius at Rome, we find three very fine initials, and we can trace back the set to which they belong to Sixtus Riessinger, who used some of them in his edition of a 'Tractatus Solemnis,' by Philippus de Barberiis in 1480. This is simple enough. But, when we find what looks like the same set in the possession of Johann Müller at Nuremberg about 1473, we ask in some surprise how initials distinctively Italian should appear first at Nuremberg and afterwards find their way back to Rome? The answer to the puzzle is arrived at by tracing both the Nuremberg and the Roman initials to a set cut for Sweynheym and Pannartz, but used by them only in certain copies of a few books (e.g. the Rylands copy of the 'Suetonius' of 1472) whose purchasers preferred them to be ornamented thus rather than by illumination. One of these copies must have fallen into the hands of Müller, who imitated the designs remarkably closely, but with some minute differences, notably the addition of a thick line to the left of the initials, which in the originals are left unfinished on this side, so that they might be attached at pleasure to an ornamental border running down the margin. Thus the initials used by Müller are copies, while those of Riessinger and Servius are from the original blocks, which must have passed to them from Sweynheym and Pannartz. The difficulty in clearing up the little mystery lay in the fact that it is possible to possess a copy of every book Sweynheym and Pannartz ever printed without finding a single volume in which the initials occur.

A well-known example of the close copying of a decorative border is the conveyance by Joannes Paulus Brissensis of a border used by Edward Whitchurch for the first prayer book of Edward VI., published in 1549. Five years later a close imitation of this, even to the retention of the initials E. W., appears on the title-page of a commentary on Aristotle ('Dialectica Resolutio cum textu'), published by Brissensis in Mexico.

We come now to the last and most interesting section of our subject, the cuts in which one artist has borrowed the design of another, but whether imitating it freely or closely has introduced modifications in technical treatment which make it his own, harmonising it so closely with the work of his own city or country that it easily takes its place with purely native designs until by some chance its real origin is discovered. For various reasons these transformations are almost, though not entirely, confined to Italy. Thus it would be idle to expect them in England because there was no English school of design or engraving of sufficient individuality to modify the style of the cuts it borrowed. In Germany, on the other hand, the native school was immensely productive, and had a long start of France and Italy in point of time. Very shortly after 1470 we find illustrated books at Augsburg and Ulm of a simple excellence which could not be bettered. In France and Italy we get a few good books about 1480, but woodcuts do not become common till ten years later. One of the few very early illustrated books of Italy, the 'Valturius,' printed at Verona in 1472, was indeed copied in Germany, the cuts being reproduced in reverse in an undated 'Vegetius,' probably printed at Augsburg about 1475 by Johann Wiener, though it should be mentioned that Dr. Muther, like a true Teuton, tries to claim priority for his countrymen by bringing back the 'Vegetius' to about 1470. But this is a solitary instance, which belongs, moreover, to an earlier section of our subject, and, until Mr. Redgrave communicated to the Bibliographical Society his paper on the early illustrated books of Oppenheim, I knew of nothing more apposite. In that paper, however, Mr. Redgrave showed how both the border of the 'Calendar,' printed by Ratdolt at Venice in 1476, and some of Ratdolt's ornamental initials, were closely imitated by Johann Köbel, in an undated 'Passio Domini.' The two books were separated by an interval of quite thirty years, and Köbel in imitating Ratdolt was not content with his delicate outline, but put in a heavy background which does not improve it. Some late German prayer-books show traces of the influence of the French 'Horae,' but beyond these I know of nothing.

The case of Holland is somewhat similar to that of Germany. In the last decade of the fifteenth century, the Dutch woodcutters imitated closely, or directly borrowed, from the French 'Horae,' but the best work, which is also the earliest, was entirely original.

In the sixteenth century the popular printers, like John of Doesborgh, no doubt obtained their haphazard illustrations whence and how they could. In the editions of 'Le Chevalier Délibéré,' by Olivier de la Marche, printed at Antwerp in French and Spanish, in 1547, etc., I thought, at first, that I had found an instance of artistic copying of a very interesting nature, for there is a close connection in design between these highly-finished cuts and the rude yet striking work in the edition printed at Gouda, by Gottfried van Os, shortly after 1486. Inasmuch, however, as La Marche had given elaborate directions for the illumination of his poem, it is obvious that by following these directions any two designers would obtain fairly similar results, without any direct imitation of one by the other.

As far as my own information goes, the French wood-cutters trusted almost entirely to their own imagination during the fifteenth century, and, when they took to borrowing for their 'Horae,' borrowed outright without any attempt at adaptation. One famous example of copying of a later date deserves mention. In 1545 the younger Aldus printed at Venice a second edition of the famous 'Hypnerotomachia,' and either this or the original of 1499 attracted the attention of Gohorry, who made a translation which was revised by Jean Martin and printed by Jacques Kerver in 1546. The cuts to this translation have been variously attributed to Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin, but a moment's glance at the book will show that they are not all by the same hand. The majority of the illustrations show wretched work, and are very clumsily cut, but those at the beginning and a few in the latter part of the volume are fine examples of artistic translation into a different manner. I give here the scene of Poliphilo by the river bank from both the original and the copy, and old favourite as the Venetian cut justly is, I think that the French cut attains almost equal excellence in another style. No finer example of free adaptation could easily be found.

CUT FROM THE 'POLIPHILO' OF VENICE, 1499. (REDUCED)

When we come to Italy we find a wholly different set of conditions. Here book-illustration started late, but during the twenty years from 1490 to 1510 its vogue was enormous, and great as was the fertility of the Italian designers it was natural that in face of the demands made upon them by the publishers they should seek help whereever they could find it. But in Italy at this period every craftsman was an artist, and whether he sought his inspiration in the paintings which he saw around him, in the engravings on copper which had flourished long before book-illustration became popular, in the cuts in foreign books, or in those published in other districts of his own country, the Italian woodcutter always put his own individuality into his work and made the design he was copying his own. I am unfortunately unacquainted with the pictures to which Dr. Lippmann and Dr. Kristeller have traced three or four of the Venetian and Florentine woodcuts,[7] but the examples of translation from engravings on copper to woodcuts in the Venetian 'Petrarch' of 1490, in the second Florentine edition of Bettini's 'Monte Sancto di Dio' (1491), and in the illustration of the works of mercy in the 'Libro delli Comandamente di Dio' of Fra Marco del Monte Sancta Maria (Florence, 1496), are extremely interesting, and show how well the workmen, especially those of Florence, understood the principle of artistic selection.

THE SAME CUT AS REDRAWN IN THE FRENCH EDITION OF THE 'POLIPHILO,' 1546. (RATHER MORE REDUCED)

No more characteristic example of free imitation can be found than in the use made of the cuts in the Latin and German Bibles, printed by Quentell at Cologne about 1480, by the illustrator of the Malermi Bible ten years later. The German cuts are large and clumsy (measuring about 7½ x 5 in.), overcrowded with figures, and with the rudest ideas of perspective and arrangement. The little Italian vignettes, on the other hand, are gracefully and delicately designed, and it is only from the presence of some purely fanciful accessory, such as the pond and the swan swimming in it in the examples here given, that we are compelled to recognise the debt of the Venetian artist to his German predecessor.

CUT FROM THE QUENTELL BIBLE. (COLOGNE, C. 1480. MUCH REDUCED)

ADAPTATION OF THE COLOGNE CUT FOR THE MALERMI BIBLE. (VENICE, 1490)

Another, though a less interesting example of the adaptation of large and rather clumsy cuts to the scale of the little Venetian vignettes is the imitation in the 'Terence,' published by Simon de Luere at Venice in 1497, of the illustrations in Trechsel's edition which had appeared at Lyons four years earlier. Again, if, as I believe, we should attribute the first illustrated Italian edition of the 'Ars Moriendi,' printed in 1490, 'co li figure accomodati per Johanne clein & Piero himel de alamanis,' to Venice rather than to Lyons, we may claim the majority of the cuts in this as additional examples of intelligent, if not very original, adaptation by Venetian artists, the originals, in this case, being the designs first used in the German block-books, imitated again two years later, by Vérard at Paris.

It is true that after 1496 Cleyn was printing at Lyons, and that there is a Lyonnese book with the probably erroneous date 1478 by him, but we have no evidence, I believe, of his whereabouts in 1490, and there is one cut in the book, for which, as far as I know, the artist drew entirely on his own imagination, and this appears to me to be much more Venetian in its character than Lyonnese.[8] I give this cut from a copy in the British Museum which has unluckily been heavily coloured, so that the reproduction was no easy matter. It comes within our subject, not only as evidence for the Venetian origin of the edition, but as the original of the little cut on the title of the 'Omnis Mortalium Cura' of S. Antonino, printed for Pacini in 1507; the differences between the copy and the original being characteristic of the alteration in tone always introduced by Florentine artists when dealing with foreign work. The border has been simplified and at the same time given the usual black background. The recesses of the church are in unrelieved black instead of merely shaded. The figures are slighter and more graceful, and good taste is shown in the removal of the whispering devils, one of whom bears a scroll with the words 'nolo dire,' while the other inscription contains the word 'vergogna' (shame), preceded by some other letters which I cannot decipher in the Museum copy. It will be noticed that the Florentine artist has reversed the positions of the figures, but not the little altar-piece. The other cuts in the 1490 'Arte del Morire' also found Florentine imitators, as I cannot doubt that it was through them that the illustrator of the Florentine editions of c. 1495 and 1513 obtained his knowledge of the German designs which he followed in ten of his cuts. Some of the designs are copied in reverse, others directly, but in nearly every instance we find that by a number of small touches the cut has been made to assume a distinctly Florentine appearance.

ILLUSTRATION ON THE BACK OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE 'ARTE DEL BEN MORIRE,' PRINTED IN 1490 BY JOHANN CLEYN AND PIERO HIMEL, PROBABLY AT VENICE

FLORENTINE ADAPTATION OF THE SAME CUT USED ON THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE SOMMA 'OMNIS MORTALIUM CURA' OF S. ANTONINO. PACINI, 1507

Among other books in which Florence followed the lead of Venice the 'Meditazioni' of San Bonaventura and the 'Fior di Virtù' are perhaps the most important. For my frontispiece to this article, however, I have preferred to hark back to the 'Lunare' of Granollachs, the Florentine edition of which (1496) is as good an instance of artistic imitation of that of Naples, as is the Roman (see page 83) of incompetent servility.

I have already written at greater length than I intended, and am conscious that all I have said is dry, fragmentary, and disjointed. There is, however, still one point which I should like to put forward in connection with these different styles of copying. In 'The Masters of Wood-Engraving' Mr. Linton has endeavoured to limit our idea of the work of the early woodcutters to the mere faithful cutting on the wood the lines marked down for them by the designer. In this theory Mr. Linton stands at the opposite extreme to Sir W. M. Conway, who, in 'The Woodcutters of the Netherlands,' hardly made sufficient allowance for the differences in cutting which might be produced by different designs. Of the two, however, Sir W. M. Conway seems to me to be the nearer to the truth, and I think these instances in which we have both the design and the woodcutter's copy before us help us to understand the method of work. No one can believe that the hand of any artist intervened between the Naples 'Granollachs' and its Roman interpreter, and I feel tolerably sure myself that in the two Florentine cuts I have given, the differences of treatment are also due to the craftsman. In the Venetian translation from the cuts in the Cologne Bible and in the French adaptation of the 'Hypnerotomachia' we have, of course, a different set of conditions, and we must not try to ignore them. But until positive evidence to the contrary is produced, it is reasonable to believe that the craftsman often supplied his own designs, and the artist was often his own woodcutter, and the examples of imitation at which we have been looking seem to me to strengthen this theory.

[ES TU SCHOLARIS?][9]

IN the following pages I propose to offer a little picture of school-life four hundred years ago, culled from an old Latin dialogue book which was published anonymously in the fifteenth century under the title 'Es tu scholaris?' and went through many editions in different countries. All through the Middle Ages boys were supposed to speak Latin in school, and this with some reason, since if they meant to be scholars when they grew up, to be able to speak and write Latin fluently would be far more useful to them than the acquisition of any single modern language. But no doubt it did not come easily to them, and our anonymous author seems to have thought that it might not come quite easily to their masters to show them how to do it, since, as we shall see, he wrote his book for use in the humbler kind of schools, where the master himself might be a man of no great learning. In fact he begins by pointing out the inconvenience of a master not being able to answer his boys' questions, and to obviate this offers some ready-made dialogues on what he considered suitable topics.

All the earlier dialogues begin with the words from which the book takes its title—Are you a scholar? 'Es tu scholaris?' says the master. 'Sum,' says the boy, ('knowing the language'), and then begin the variations.

FROM THE FLORES POETARUM, S.A.

The cruellest of these is a kind of 'fool's mate' (to borrow a term from chess), in which the master asks, 'What gender is sum?' and it is to be hoped used his victory mercifully if his victim fell into the trap. When the first variations are exhausted we come to a 'Where are you a scholar?' to which the correct answer is 'Here and everywhere, and in all honest places,' honest places being subsequently defined as of four kinds, that is to say, at church, at school, at home with one's parents and in the company of able men (ecclesia, scola, domus propria circa parentes et convivium peritorum virorum). Of a sudden the master waxes humorous and demands 'Es tu scutellavarius,' a portentous word which apparently means a 'washer-up,' since the boy emphasises his denial by explaining that he does not wash plates in the kitchen (quod non lavo scutellas in coquina). On this there follows some talk about religion, and we then approach scholastic topics with the question, 'Do you know Latin?' 'I do,' answers the boy, with happy confidence, and then in reply to the further question, 'What is Latin?' is made to return the remarkable answer, that Latin is a very noble idiom taking its origin from the fountains of the Greeks (nobilissimum ideoma ex fontibus Graecorum ortum habens). Comparative philology was in its infancy in those days, and as even now there are worthy people who believe that English is derived from German, we need not throw stones.

The next pages contain some interesting talk on the four chief books in use in grammar schools, the 'Tabula' or horn-book on which was written the Lord's Prayer, the moral sayings of 'Cato,' the accidence of Donatus, and the syntax and prosody of Alexander Gallus; but we must hurry on to the more human side of our text-book. There are 'verba obedientiae' helping the boy to assure his master that for the future he will be very careful not to anger him (de cetero vos[10] commovere percavebo), suggestions for defence where a fault could be denied, and ready-made excuses where it was obvious. I regret to say that there are also ready-made 'verba accusationis': 'Please Sir, Jones has torn my grammar' (Joannes Donatum meum dilaniavit) or 'That boy called me the son of a thief' (Ille mihi dixit filium furis). These are evidently tips for whiners in the school itself, but we have a more awful picture in the demand, 'Wherefore, honoured Sir, I earnestly beg you to take steps against evil-doings and punish these fellows scholastically.' No doubt Brown minor had run into some dignity in the street, and this is the formula with which the dignity demanded that Brown should be 'hoisted,' which I take to be the meaning of 'scolastice corrigatis.'

For invitation to dinner and the offering of gifts there are quite a bewildering set of forms, reminding us that school-fees in those days were often paid in kind. In the offering and acceptance of these there is much politeness on each side. The boy begs that the smallness of his present may be excused on account of his poverty and goodwill, or promises that if the master will honour his parents at dinner the best cheer they can provide shall be set before him. The master, on his side, replies that he is quite unworthy of these entertainments, but lest he should seem to despise them he will certainly come. (Nimium est non enim sum dignus cum parentibus tuis prandere. Ne autem me dicant eorum prandium spernere comparebo libenter.) There are also forms of invitation for boys to use to their friends, and Jones (using the polite plural) asks Brown to dinner to-morrow at his parents' request.

Some of the shorter remarks seem to apply to a boarding school. 'Dear master, with your permission, I should like to take a bath' says one boy: another asks that he may go and lay the table, a third that he may take the clothes to the washerwoman! A boy whose mother has called for him addresses his petition for leave to the Precentor, and we may guess therefore that these boarding-schools were attached to churches or monasteries, and that the boys, like the monks themselves, had to do much of their own household work.

The boys are given plenty of tips for talk among themselves. 'Why were you late to-day?' asks one, and is reminded that bed is warm and sleep sweeter than honey. One boy sees a priest coming into the school and hopes he will ask for a holiday. His fellow says they have had several holidays lately and doubts if another will be granted. The gloomy side of medieval school-life is not left unrepresented. 'How often have you been punished to-day?' is one of the questions, and as if the alternative answers 'semel—bis—ter—quater,' were not enough, they are crowned with the cruel prophecy 'et iterum cras corrigeris.'

The last paragraph of the book is concerned with the appointment, duties and behaviour of monitors. They are called 'monitors' nowadays because, I suppose, they jog memories as to what is the next day's work, and in other ways prevent crime. In those days they were called 'custodes,' chiefly I am afraid because they kept the rods. 'You've got to appoint monitors, Sir,' says a boy. 'You be monitor, then,' 'Please, Sir, I've only just been monitor, and it's not my turn.' 'Who ought to be appointed then?' 'This is the boy, Sir, both because it's his turn and because he knows how to get you long and nasty rods!' That is one dialogue. Here is another, boy with boy. 'Have you been putting down the boys who made a disturbance and ran as they came out of church?' 'I have.' 'Have you been putting me down?' 'I have; Jones saw you running in the street and gave me your name to be put down.' 'Dear monitor, take my name off, lest I be punished, and I'll ask my mother to give you a big bun (magnum panem).' 'Hold your tongue, then, and I'll take it off'—whereat the boy thanks heaven, and we gather that there was rather a bad tone in the schools in which 'Es tu Scolaris?' was in use. It must also be said that if the boys talked as they were taught, they talked very bad Latin.

The edition from which I have taken these notes has no 'woodcuts.' If it had had one it would probably have been something of the nature of this picture from an English grammar book, in which the master is shown armed with the usual birch. The grammars of those days were in fact so bad that it was held to be impossible for any one to learn them without the additional notes offered by a rod. But for my first illustration (p. 100), I have taken a more human and, I think, a more lifelike picture, from a 'Flores Poetarum' printed at Florence about 1500. No doubt by the time boys came to study poetry they had reached a more mature stage, and were treated better. But these young scholars look boyish and vivacious enough, and I would fain hope that this is a true picture of a Florentine classroom. A Venetian book goes even beyond this, anticipating the methods of the Newest Educators, for in a woodcut to it, while the elder students are shown as solemnly attending to a lecture, two little boys are studying their A B C on the floor, with a small dog to help them. But this picture is so plainly imaginative that I will not even show it.

[ENGLISH BOOKS PRINTED ABROAD][11]

IT may fairly be said that only a writer who knew nothing about them would propose, in a half-hour's paper, to talk about the English books printed abroad, in some forty different places, during the last four centuries. But a consideration of the earlier of these books forms a necessary part of the Society's contribution to the Bibliography of English Literature up to 1640, and the subject, as a whole, has for a long time seemed to me an interesting one; since, either in the state of the printing trade at home, or in the circumstances of the author, or the nature of his subject, in every case a special reason has to be found why the book should have been printed out of England. I have, therefore, light-heartedly endeavoured to map out the broader outlines of the subject, in the hope that I may persuade other members of the Society to give their help in filling in the details, and I must ask you to remember that my paper is put forward only as a means of provoking a discussion much more valuable than anything I can contribute myself.

I have said that the subject we have before us this evening is the English books printed abroad during the last four centuries. It would have been more accurate to say during the last four centuries and a quarter,[12] for the latest book I shall have to mention was printed in Florence in 1895, while Caxton began printing English books at Bruges in 1474 or 1475, and even earlier than these we have a Sarum Breviary printed at Cologne, and assigned by Mr. Gordon Duff to the year 1473. These Sarum Service-books, with which so many foreign printers busied themselves during the next eighty-five years, lie on the outskirts of our subject, as the greater number of them are wholly or mainly in Latin, and we are obliged to limit ourselves at present to English books, and may not take in the very considerable number of Latin works written by Englishmen, and intended mainly for the English market, though printed abroad. It is necessary, indeed, to remember that for some generations after the invention of printing, our country, for many classes of books, was wholly dependent on the enterprise of continental printers, and that, to some extent, this is still the case. A single oration of Cicero and the plays of Terence were the only Latin classics printed in England during the fifteenth century. No Greek book appeared here until 1543, and several of the great Greek classics did not find an English printer until the second half of the seventeenth century. Even now, for the obscurer classics, and for the bulk of Oriental books, we are content to rely on Germany, and in the fifteenth century this reliance on the continental presses extended to every variety of learned book. It would be absurd to attribute this state of things to any lack of enterprise on the part of Caxton and his fellows. Our President has lately shown how carefully, even in Italy, the first printers felt the pulse of their market, and whereas Venice was a great trade centre for the whole of Europe, in England a publisher who produced a book too learned to find purchasers here would have had little chance of appealing to the book lovers of other countries. Thus it may be urged in defence of the Act of Richard III., which permitted books to be imported into England from abroad and freely sold here, that by encouraging English printers to confine themselves to the popular books for which there was a safe market, it saved them from any temptation to risk the fate which Sweynheym and Pannartz had incurred at Rome; at the same time it greatly helped forward the cause of education. Only three foreign printers, Gerard Leeu and Jan van Doesborgh at Antwerp, and Antoine Vérard at Paris, abused the liberty granted to them by competing needlessly with our native printers in books they were capable of printing equally well themselves. The four popular English books printed by Leeu, who had a special fount of type cut for the purpose, were 'The History of Jason,' 'The History of Knight Paris and the Fair Vienne,' 'The Dialogue of Salomon and Marcolphus,' and 'The Chronicles of England.' These were all issued in 1492 and 1493, and all with the exception of the 'Marcolphus,' were reprints of editions issued by Caxton. Even the 'Marcolphus,' according to Mr. Duff, who has edited a facsimile reprint of it for Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen, may possibly have been reprinted from a Caxton now entirely lost, though this, of course, is a mere conjecture.

Of Doesborgh's English books there is no need to speak at length, since all Members of the Society have in their possession Mr. Proctor's exhaustive monograph of this printer's work. As a printer he was very inferior to Leeu, but as a publisher he showed much more enterprise in his choice of books, introducing to English readers the stories of 'Euryalus and Lucretia,' 'Virgilius the Magician,' 'Frederick of Jennen,' 'Mary of Nemmegen,' 'Tyll Howleglas,' and the 'Parson of Kalenborowe,' in addition to the still more notable book 'Of the New Lands.' Of the thirty-two books which Mr. Proctor has been able to assign to Doesborgh's press, no fewer than eighteen were printed for England, comprising grammars, stories, theology, history, geography, a prognostication, a medical book, and two books on the valuation of gold and silver, thus covering nearly the whole range of the popular literature of the day. The earliest of these books appeared before 1508, the latest some time after 1520, and they thus came out at the rate of rather over one a year. They were all, however, of the class of books which rapidly get themselves thumbed out of existence, and from the extreme rarity of those which survive it is probable that Doesborgh's real output was considerably greater. Antoine Vérard, on the other hand, had a trick of printing a few copies of his books on vellum which has greatly helped to preserve them, and it is improbable that, besides his Service-books, he printed any other works for the English market than the two which have come down to us. These are 'The traitte of god lyuyng and good deyng,' and 'The Kalendayr of Shyppars,' both printed in 1503, and both enriched with numerous illustrations, some beautiful, others grotesquely horrible, mostly taken from his 'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir' of 1492. In his choice of a translator Vérard was unlucky, for he seems to have employed some wild Scotsman, who was no master of his own tongue and still more ignorant of French. When Robert Copland retranslated the Kalendar for Wynkyn de Worde in 1508, he was as scornful of his predecessor's 'corrupte Englysshe' as any one bibliographer could be of the labours of another, though in saying that 'no man coulde understonde (it) perfectly' he certainly did not err on the side of exaggeration, since most southern readers must have found some difficulty in understanding it at all.

To the names of Leeu, Doesborgh, and Vérard, as printers of English popular books, I ought perhaps to add those of Wolfgang Hopyl of Paris, and Martin Morin and James Ravynell of Rouen, each of whom printed before 1500 an edition of the 'Liber Festivalis' or 'Festial,' the book of sermons with which parsons might regale their parishioners on the high-days and holy-days of the Church. The 'Festial' was of a semi-liturgical nature, and the three printers were all printers of liturgies. We have, thus, an easy transition to the English Service-books printed abroad to which we must now return for a few minutes. Of these the immense majority were for the use of Sarum, though the British Museum possesses a Hereford Missal printed at Rouen in 1502, and three York Missals printed at the same place in 1516-17. Of Sarum Service-books printed before 1540, the 'Old English Catalogue' records no less than one hundred and five as in the possession of the Museum in 1884, and the distribution of these is notable. One Missal was printed at Basel, by Michael Wenssler about 1486; another Missal by Hertzog, at Venice in 1494; eleven service-books at Rouen, the earlier ones by Martin Morin, James Ravynell, P. Violette, and Andrew Myllar; twelve at Antwerp, of which one is a 'Directorium' printed by Leeu in 1488, and most of the rest much later books from the press of Christopher of Endhouen; and lastly no less than fifty-six at Paris, the list of their printers comprising many of the best firms of the time. Against these eighty-one foreign editions, of which, it will be observed, sixty-seven are French, the editions printed in England number no more than twenty-four, and many of these are printed with cuts borrowed or copied from France. Obviously this class of work required special qualifications in the printers, and it was easier and cheaper to import the Service-books, even the Primers, than to produce them at home. During the last few years of Henry VIII.'s reign the number of Service-books, which had previously shown some falling off, again increased, and under his daughter Mary there was, of course, a great revival of them. The English printers were now better able to cope with the demand, and of the forty-five Service-books in the Museum printed during these years, twenty-four were printed in London, against ten at Rouen, five at Paris, and six at Antwerp. Of course, the Museum collection, both of these and of the earlier Service-books, is by no means complete, but it is probably representative, and there can be no doubt that during the period when liturgies are most interesting bibliographically, four-fifths of those printed for use in England came to us from abroad.

One other small class of books, printed like liturgies for the most part in Latin, but with lapses into English, must be noticed before we proceed further—the Latin Grammars for the instruction of English school-boys. The earliest of these is an edition of the Grammar of Perottus, printed by Egidius van der Heerstraten at Louvain, about 1486, and other grammar-books by Anwykyll and Joannes de Garlandia are said to have been printed during the fifteenth century at Deventer, Antwerp, Cologne, and Paris. If any Member of the Society can give me a list of these dreadful little books I shall be very grateful to him, but they have always filled me with so much compassion for the unfortunate children who had to learn them, that I am afraid I have taken no notes of the few I have seen.

In order to give an idea of the way in which the English books printed abroad reflect the changing phases of our national life I propose now to trace with a little more particularity the history of the classes of the English books printed at Antwerp, where throughout the sixteenth century they are specially plentiful. We begin in the quiet days of Gerard Leeu and Jan van Doesborgh, who, good honest men, could have had no other object in their English publications than the making a little profit out of some popular subjects which our native printers were neglecting. The three grammar-books printed by Thierry Martens for Jacobi and Pelgrim in 1507 and 1508, are not very interesting. Christopher of Endhoven, who calls himself with equal frequency Ruremondensis, followed in 1523 in a higher branch of the trade, competing with the printers of Rouen and Paris who produced the Sarum Service-books in such numbers. From 1523 to 1531, the succession of Missals, Processionals, Manuals, Psalters, Hymnals, Breviaries and Horae, which were printed by Endhoven at Antwerp, and sold in London, mostly by Francis Byrckman or Peter Kaetz, is broken only by an edition of Lyndewood's 'Provinciale.' In 1531 we hear for the first time a different note, three books being printed in that year for William Tyndal, which are ascribed to the press of Martin Lempereur, viz.: 'The prophete Jonas, with an introducciõ before, teachinge to vnderstonde him'; 'The exposition of the fyrste Epistle of seynt Jhon'; and 'The praier and complaynte of the ploweman unto Christe'; the latter an old book which the title assigns to not long after 1300. The next year the widow of Endhoven printed another Sarum 'Hymnal,' but in 1534 she was employed by the Reformers, printing George Joy's revision of Tyndal's New Testament, while Joy's English Psalter, and Tyndal's own New Testament were printed by Lempereur. Antwerp editions of the same year of the 'Rudimenta Grammatices,' originally drawn up for Wolsey's school at Ipswich, and of a 'Prognostication,' show that the Dutch printers did not quite forget the existence of untheological English readers, but for a long time to come theology was paramount in English books printed abroad. Several editions of Tyndal's New Testament were printed at Antwerp in 1535, 1536 and 1538, and though the attribution of the Coverdale Bible of 1535 to the press of Jacob van Meteren (a point which I leave to our Bible experts) is not undisputed, it seems generally agreed that the composite version known as 'Matthew's Bible,' brought out by Grafton and Whitchurch in 1537, was really the work of an Antwerp printer, probably Martin Lempereur.

After 1538 there seems to have been a break in the English printing at Antwerp for just a quarter of a century, during which no English work of any importance was issued, the fugitive Reformers finding Switzerland a much safer refuge at this time than the Low Countries. But in 1563 Aegidius Diest printed two books (Vincentius Lirinensis 'On the Antiquity of the Catholick Faith,' and the 'Buke of Fourscore three Questions proponit to the Protestants in Scotland), for Ninian Winzet, a Scotch Catholic in exile for his religion. The times we see have changed, and it is now the Romanist Refugees who seek printers abroad, and the Protestants who answer them in comfortable safety at home; and for several years the Romanists kept the Dutch printers pretty busy. From 1564 to 1569, Diest and Laet at Antwerp, Bogard and Fouler at Louvain, printed between them forty English books, by Harding, Rastell, Martiall, Stapleton, Allen, and Saunders, all more or less called forth by Bishop Jewel's 'Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae,' which naturally roused the ire of the Catholics, more particularly of Harding, whom Jewel had ejected from his prebendship.

The ill-health which preceded Jewel's death in 1571 caused him to weary of controversies, and his opponents at last wearied also, the next few years being very unproductive of English books in the Low Countries. When activity revived, Antwerp no longer maintained its supremacy. The majority of the Catholic books were printed now either at Louvain or Douay, while the new refugees, the extreme Puritans and Brownists, took up their quarters at Middleburg, where their books were mostly printed for them by J. or R. Schilders. Whether Middleburg was also the real place of imprint of the editions of Marlowe's 'Epigrammes and Elegies,' the first of which appeared in 1599, is one of the difficulties which still await a final investigation. Mr. Charles Edmonds preferred to assign it to the press of W. Jaggard, with whose edition of the 'Passionate Pilgrim' it is bound up in the Isham collection. In 1589 and 1590 we hear of another Puritan refugee press at Dort, where several works were printed for Barrow and Greenwood, while in 1597 Henoch Clapham found a local printer for two theological works which he had compiled for the benefit of the 'poore English congregation in Amsterdam'; one or two books were also printed for English students at Leyden, and some English medical works at Dort, so that by the end of the century the earlier monopoly of Antwerp was completely destroyed.

We must turn back now to glance at some other places where English books were printed, and first we may note that even in this most theological of centuries a few miscellaneous works demand our attention. Thus in 1551 J. Gryphius of Venice found it worth his while to print a 'Compendious Declaration,' by Thomas Raynalde, 'of the vertues of a certain lateli invented oile,' called 'Oile Imperiale,' and a little later on, when William Turner was tired of 'hunting the Romische wolfe,' Arnold Birckman printed for him, at Cologne, the two parts of his 'Herbal' and his treatise on 'Baths.' Frellon's English edition (Lyons 1549) of Holbein's 'Images of the Old Testament' had no theological import, but is an early example of the printing of the explanatory text of an illustrated book in more languages than one, so as to secure a larger sale. Lastly we must not forget one very important work, Theodor de Bry's 'Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia,' printed by J. Wechel at Frankfort in 1590. The great bulk, however, of the English books printed abroad during the sixteenth century were theological, and the presses of Augsburg, Basel, Cologne, Geneva, Munster, Nuremberg, Strasburg, Wesel, Wittenberg, and Zurich, besides the famous one of 'Marlborow in the land of Hesse,' all testified to the activity of the English Reformers.

The difficulties which beset the history of these English books printed in Germany and Switzerland are well known. We are not often, in dealing with them, pulled up so sharply as when we find a book of Knox or Bale professedly printed 'at Rome before the Castell of S. Angel,' but there are other imprints in original editions the authenticity of which has been suspected, and the question is immensely complicated by the existence of London editions in which the old imprint has been sedulously preserved. A very large number also of the most interesting books contain no indication whatever of their origin, and the rash attempts to place them, which have been made in catalogues and bibliographies, are often the reverse of helpful. I hope that the Society may eventually help to put the subject on a better footing, but all I can do now is to mention a handful of books, rather with a view of showing the haunts of the reforming authors at various periods than with much bibliographical intention. Thus the edition of Tyndal's New Testament was printed for him by Peter Quentel, at Cologne, in 1525. From 1528 to 1530, we find him employing Hans Lufft 'at Marlborow in the land of Hesse,' to print his 'Obedience of a Christian Man,' 'Parable of the Wicked Mammon' and 'Genesis.' In 1531, as we have seen, Martin Lempereur was working for him at Antwerp. John Frith's 'Pistle to the Cristen Reader' was printed by Lufft, his 'Answer' to More, written when he was a prisoner in the Tower, by C. Willems of Munster. Of the next generation of Reformers, John Bale, Bishop of Ossory, appears first as employing Michael Wood to print his 'Mystery of Iniquity,' at Geneva, in 1545; in 1546, his tract on the 'Examinacyon of Anne Askew' bears the imprint Marburg, and his 'Actes of English Votaries' that of Wesel. His best known work, the 'Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum Summarium' (1548), was apparently begun at Wesel by Theodoricus Plateanus and finished at Ipswich by John Overton. After the accession of Mary, Bale seems to have had a hand in one or two books which appear with the imprint, Roane or Rouen, which perhaps is no more authentic than that of 'Rome, before the Castell of St. Angel,' which appears on his account of his 'Vocacyon to the bishopric of Ossory,' in 1553. A correspondent has suggested to me that this last may have been printed at Strasburg; but Knox's book with the same imprint, 'A godly letter sent to the faythefull in London, Newcastell and Barwyke' is attributed in the British Museum Catalogue to the press of Hugh Singleton, in London, and this may have been printed there also. Knox's other books with foreign imprints are mostly Genevan, 'An Answer to a great number of blasphemous cavillations' being printed by Jean Crespin, and 'the copye of a letter sent to the Lady Marye' by J. Poullain and A. Reboul. His 'Faithful Admonition unto the Professours of God's Truths in England,' professedly hails from 'Kalykow,' its real origin being doubtful.

We must hasten on now to the supporters of the other side of the religious controversy, who, on the accession of Elizabeth, in their turn had to seek refuge abroad. As we have seen, they at first congregated at Antwerp, but in 1568 William Allen, afterwards Cardinal, founded the English College at Douay, and thereby made it the headquarters of the English Catholic Press during the next century. Important, however, as Douay is, cataloguers have, perhaps, worked its printers a little too hard, and the tendency to ascribe to them every English Catholic book with a foreign appearance is unfortunate. We must remember that for fifteen years from 1578 the English College was transplanted to Rheims, which thus had the honour of producing, in 1582, the first Roman Catholic version of the New Testament, completed twenty-seven years later by the issue of the Old Testament at Douay in 1609-10. The New Testament was printed by J. Fogny, the Old by Laurence Kellam, and it is needless to say that the versions of both books were vigorously attacked by the Protestant experts. The absence of the English College from Douay, from 1578-93, of course diminishes the probability of English books having been printed there during these years, and the foundation of the Seminary at S. Omer, in the year of its return, soon provided a formidable rival. It appears, however, from the town records that printing was only introduced into S. Omer in 1601, when the town made a grant of 100 livres to F. Bellet for his expenses in bringing thither his press. According to Dr. Oliver, the biographer of the English Jesuits, a book entitled 'An apology for the Arch-Priest,' by the indefatigable Father Parsons, was printed at S. Omer in this same year, 1601, so that Bellet must have got to work very quickly, unless the College had a separate press of its own. Fitzherbert's 'Defence of the Catholic Cause,' dated 1602, is also assigned to Saint Omer, as are the majority of the books mentioned by Oliver as having been printed during the next twenty years. The earliest names I find connected with the Saint Omer press are those of C. Bocard, and John Higham, the latter of whom printed simultaneously at Douay, just as, at an earlier period, J. Fouler had done at Douay, Antwerp, and Louvain. These two latter places were not unproductive of English books during the seventeenth century, and others were printed at Brussels, Ghent, Paris, and Rouen, so that wholesale attributions to Douay are eminently unsafe. It is noteworthy, indeed, that Duthillceul in his 'Bibliographie douaisienne' (second edition, 1842), mentions only just over twenty books as having been printed in English at Douay up to the close of the seventeenth century. This, of course, is ludicrously below the mark, Duthillceul's failure to discover English books being, no doubt, due to their having found their way to the country for which they were intended. As I have said, however, everything points to the English press at Douay having been considerably less prolific than is generally believed.

We must pass on once more and enter the trackless wilderness of the period after 1640. No doubt the enormous increase in the output of the press makes its history during the last two centuries and a half dishearteningly difficult, but when I see all our bibliographical stalwarts so sedulously engaged in crossing the 't's' and dotting the 'i's' in the work of their predecessors in the early history of printing, I cannot help regretting that at least a few of them will not turn their attention to the later period in which everything still remains to be done. As far as I can judge, the Civil War did not leave many traces in English books printed abroad, but I have come across a few of some little interest. Residence in Roman Catholic countries seems to have caused a good many cavaliers to reconsider their religious position, and some of them found it necessary to explain themselves in print. Several books of this kind were printed in Paris. Thus in 1644 Sir Kenelm Digby put forth 'Two Treatises,' one of which was concerned with the 'Immortality of reasonable souls,' while in 1652, Peter Targa published for him 'A Discourse concerning Infallibility in Religion,' which was reprinted in the same year at Amsterdam. In 1647 there was published at Paris an English work called 'Exomologesis,' recording the conversion of Hugh Paulin de Cressy, and this went into a second edition six years later. In 1649 we come across 'A Lost Sheep returned Home, or the motives of the conversion of Thomas Vane,' and in 1657, 'Presbyteries Triall, or the occasion and motives of conversion to the Catholic Faith of a person of quality in Scotland.' We find also several English works of devotion printed in Paris about this time, and in 1659 we have an anonymous 'Answer to the Provinciall Letters published by the Jansenists.' The impatience of the Royalist Colony in France could not wait for the importation of copies of the 'Eikon Basilike' from England, and at least one edition was published in Paris in 1649, as to which Mr. Almack's book (No. 28 in his list) gives full information. At the Hague the King's execution produced a very curious work, a translation of the 'Electra' of Sophocles by C. W. (Christopher Wace), 'presented to her highness the Lady Elizabeth; with an epilogue, shewing the parallel in two points, the Return and the Restauration.' This was the first English rendering of any part of Sophocles, but I see that I wrote of it some years ago that it was 'beneath contempt,' and, I daresay, this unkind opinion had good foundation. In 1653 we have at Bruges an echo of the Lilburne controversy, in an answer to his pamphlet, 'John Lilburne revived,' written by Captain Wendy, under the title 'Vincit qui patitur, or Lieutenant-Colonel John Lylburne decyphered.' Lastly, at the Hague in 1660, Sir William Lower published a 'Relation in form of a Journal of the Voiage and Residencie which Charles II. hath made in Holland,' and this is the last book of the Civil War period of which I have a note.

During the reign of Charles II., we have the usual sprinkling of devotional and theological books printed abroad, with a few traces at Ghent and Paris of the controversies of Friar Peter Walsh. I have recollections of one or two pamphlets printed by the ministers of English Puritan Congregations in the Low Countries, but the only one of which I have a note is, 'The Interest of these United Provinces, being a Defence of the Zealanders' Choice,' in which the Rev. Joseph Hill, Pastor of the Scotch Church at Middleburg, where the book was printed, advocated in 1673 an alliance between England and Holland. Such a book would have some interest in itself, but the consequences of its publication give it additional importance in the history of book-lore. Hill's work, which was also printed at Amsterdam in Dutch, gave great offence to the States; he was ordered to leave Zeeland, to which he did not return till 1678, and it was during this enforced absence that he introduced into England, after the death of his friend Dr. Lazarus Seaman, the Dutch practice of selling books by auction. But for that unlucky pamphlet, Sotheby's and Puttick's might never have existed.

Two other Dutch printed books of this period are just worth noting, a reprint, in 1680, at the Hague, of 'Two Speeches made in the House of Peers,' by the Earl of Shaftesbury, and a 'Sermon of Thanksgiving for the delivery of Charles II.' from the conspiracy of 1683, printed at Rotterdam. As the Revolution approaches, we get a warning of it in the appearance, at the Hague, in 1687 and 1688, of the 'Citation of Gilbert Burnet' and of 'Dr. Burnet's Vindication of himself,' while after the flight of James, we may note the publication at Cologne of 'The Great Bastard, Protector of the Little One,' 'done out of French' in 1689, a Paris edition of the King's 'speeches' in 1692, under the title 'Royal Tracts,' and in the same year at Amsterdam, a 'Letter' written under the name of General Ludlow, defending his comparison of the first four years of Charles I.'s reign with the tyranny of the four years of James II. Six years later, quite in the modern manner, the old regicide published his 'Memoirs, finding a printer in Switzerland 'at Vevay, in the Canton of Bern,' where also a continuation was printed the next year.

The paper is already much longer than I had intended, and it is therefore, perhaps, as well that of English printing abroad during the first half of the eighteenth century I have found no trace, except in a few devotional books published at Douay. There ought to be some Jacobite tracts, and I need not say that any notes of them will be heartily welcomed. But there is a last phase of the foreign printing of English books of which I may be allowed to quote a few instances. For various reasons during the last hundred years or so, a good many English men and women of letters have lived abroad, and though most of them, like Byron, Beddoes, Landor, and the Brownings, have sent their books to be printed in England, their foreign residence has occasionally left interesting traces in books and booklets with foreign imprints. Thus Sir William Hamilton, while Ambassador at the Court of Naples, had two books printed for him there, one 'Campi Phlegraei' (or) 'Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies' in 1776, the other a series of collections of 'Engravings from Ancient Vases' found in Sicily, between 1791 and 1795. Gibbon's long stay in Switzerland doubtless had something to do with the publication at Berne, in 1796-97, of a reprint of his 'Miscellaneous Works' which had then only just appeared in London. Shelley's 'The Cenci' appeared in 1819, with the imprint Italy, and his 'Adonais' was printed 'at Pisa with the types of Didot' in 1821. At Parma, several English works obtained what used to be considered the honour of Bodoni's types, and the English ventures of Galignani at Paris, though far surpassed by the later enterprise of Baron Tauchnitz, deserve a chronicler. The employment of foreign presses by wandering Englishmen has not yet died out. At Davos Platz, Stevenson did better—he set up a toy press of his own. A year or two before the paper was read, Mr. William Sharp gave local colour to his 'Sospiri di Roma' by employing a Roman printer, and in 1895 an important English historical work, 'The Life of Sir Robert Dudley' was printed at Florence.

When the Bibliographical Society takes up the history of English books printed abroad, I hope that, if only in a small print appendix, room may be found for a record of these later books, and that we shall not stop at 1600, or at 1700, or at 1800, but recognise that our own age is as worthy of our attention as any of its predecessors.

[SOME PICTORIAL AND HERALDIC INITIALS][13]

PICTORIAL initials were not greatly in favour during the golden age of printing, and there is much to be said against them on the score of appropriateness and good taste. If capital letters were all either round or oval, one great difficulty would be removed from the artist's path, for a decorative circle or oval, even if a tail or handle has to be added to it, makes no bad frame for a little picture. It is therefore not surprising to find that the German designers, who were the first to attack the problem, adopted a rounded form of the letter T, shortened the shaft of a P to a minimum, and magnified the lower curve of a B or S, while reducing the upper one as much as possible. These accommodations do not make for clearness, and certain letters, such as A, E, H, and M often remained stubbornly outside any such compromises.

This difficulty as to form had been experienced and, as far as was possible, overcome, by the old illuminators, but the printers had a trouble of their own which may have made them think that movable types also were vanity. An illuminator who had to paint the same initial twelve times probably found a pleasure in varying his miniatures, but with the pictures which had not only to be drawn, but to be cut on wood or soft metal, a printer was naturally less inclined to be profuse. We know, of course, from their general practice that the early printers had generous ideas as to the adaptability of any one picture of a town or a battle to the representation of any other town or battle which might be mentioned in the text; but there were only a few subjects capable of this endless repetition, and when Leonard Holl prefixed to his edition of Ptolemy's 'Cosmographia' (Ulm, 1482) the magnificent, if not very easily recognisable, N, which shows the editor, Nicolaus Germanus, presenting his book to Pope Paul II. (fig. 1), he must have known that he would have to wait a long time before he could use it again.

1. FROM PTOLEMY'S 'COSMOGRAPHIA,' PRINTED BY LEONARD HOLL. ULM, 1482

Lucas Brandes of Lubeck, in his splendid editions of 'Josephus' and the 'Rudimentum Noviciorum,' used a fine set of initials, into which various pictures could be inserted at pleasure. Either from economy, however, or from the poverty of invention of his designer, he had recourse to no more than some half dozen subjects. In the 'Josephus' a battle-scene, a cleric at his desk, and a military scribe, who has been identified as a Knight Templar, and whose adjustable reading-desk reminds us of the latest inventions for the comfort of invalids, recur again and again. The scribe appears, conveniently enough, in the fine P here shown (fig. 2), and in a C, but we find him also huddled below the bar of an H, and perched upon that of an A. In the same way the clerk, who is prettily framed in a Q, is shown to much less advantage in an M, of which the middle stem has been broken off to make room for him. One or two of the letters have no picture to fill them in, the blocks being apparently all engaged in other parts of the book. In the 'Rudimentum Noviciorum' we find a David playing his harp within a D, and the same pictures, with the loss of the ceiling and part of the floor, is repeated in a B. The cleric and the battle-scene appear again from the 'Josephus,' and there is also a C with a rather pretty picture of the Virgin adoring the Holy Child.

2. FROM A 'JOSEPHUS' PRINTED BY LUCAS BRANDES AT LUBECK

As far as I am aware, the only books in which large pictorial initials are profusely and appropriately employed are some of the great folio German Bibles, where the certainty of a large sale and the probability of future editions encouraged the printer to liberality. Thus in the Bibles published by Günther Zainer at Augsburg in 1473 and 1477 the prologue and each successive book begins with a large initial filled in with a picture illustrating the subject of the text. The prologue begins with a B, within which are seated S. Jerome and a Bishop; Genesis with an I, to the right of which stands the Creator, while the stem is broken by a circle showing Adam and Eve in Eden; Exodus with a D, illustrating the passage of the Red Sea; Numbers with a U, within which stand Moses and Aaron. In German Bibles D and U are the initials most in request, and, though the U leaves little room for the picture, both are fairly convenient letters. On the other hand, the initial E of Job and the A of the First Book of Chronicles are awkwardly divided by their cross-bars, so that each has to contain two insignificant little pictures instead of a single important one. In most German Bibles I have seen these pictorial initials are more or less thickly coloured, so that it is impossible to reproduce them successfully, but I give here a fine I taken from the Book of Esdras in the undated edition printed by Sensenschmidt and Frisner at Nuremberg about 1476 (fig. 3).

3. FROM THE GERMAN BIBLE PRINTED BY FRISNER AND SENSENSCHMIDT AT NUREMBERG, ABOUT 1476

Outside Germany, as we have said, pictorial initials did not flourish much in the early days of printing, for the finest printers, as a rule, abjured initials altogether, and the few who used them rightly preferred purely decorative designs. In France, in some editions of the 'Mer des Histoires' and similar books, we find two or three of very large size, a huge I, with a figure of Christ within it, and the P here reproduced (fig. 4), with the usual picture of an author at his work. Vérard, however, and the few other fifteenth-century publishers who employed initials, preferred grotesques to pictures, which only occasionally, as in the magnificent L from the 'Mer des Histoires' of Pierre Le Rouge, have any high pictorial value. In another L, used at Paris and at Lyons, we have intertwined the faces of an old man and a young couple flirting. It was no doubt specially designed for the 1492 edition of the 'Matheolus,' or 'quinze joies du mariage,' in which it seems to have made its first appearance. The monkey and bagpipes L of the 'Recueil des histoires troyennes,' and the S. George-and-the-Dragon L of a Lyons reprint of the 'Mer des Histoires' may also be reckoned as pictorial, but the more ordinary varieties are purely grotesque combinations of distorted faces. These had hardly gone out of fashion before the Renaissance influence was paramount, and though I have found a few small pictorial initials in sixteenth-century French books, notably a very pretty set in a Utrecht Missal, printed by Wolfgang Hopyl at Paris in 1505,[14] they are certainly exceptional.

4. FROM AN 'OROSIUS' PUBLISHED BY VÉRARD, 1509

In Spain the dignity and severity which marks the work of the early printers were opposed to any save purely decorative initials, which, probably through the influence of the German printers in the Peninsula, came into use at an early date, and were often strikingly good. The one pictorial set I have found occurs in the 'Copilacion de Leyes,' promulgated in 1485, and printed by Centenera at Zamora, probably in the same year. Each of these initials, nine in number, is appropriate to the section of the book which it heads. Thus in an S two knights in combat herald the laws of chivalry; in an A a canonist and his scholar preside over those of matrimony; for commerce we have money-changers in a D, and so on. The initials are cut not in wood, but on soft metal, which unluckily did not yield at all a good impression, a fault by which the best Spanish decorative work is often marred.

5. INITIAL L USED BY JACQUES MAILLET AT LYONS

In Italy pictorial initials do not make their appearance until quite late. Except at Venice, indeed, printed initials of any kind were in no high esteem, at Florence not coming into use until 1489. At Venice Ratdolt's decorative alphabets found several imitators before this date, and soon after 1490 we find alphabets of children on a black ground coming into favour. In a 'Donatus,' printed, according to Signor Ongania, in 1493, by Guilelmus Tridentis, we find an open-work P, within which a boy is bringing a book to his master, and, under the date 1494, we are shown a picture of Jacobus de Voragine at work under the shadow of the same letter. Towards the end of the fifteenth century and in the early years of the sixteenth the missals of Georgius Arrivabene and Lucantonio Giunta are crowded with pictorial initials of very varying value. That here shown (fig. 6), from the 'Missale Ordinis Vallisumbrosae,' printed by Giunta in 1503, is a good example of the heavier sort. The letter thus tricked out is a G, the initial of the 'Gaudeamus' with which the introit begins on the festival of the first Abbot of Vallisumbrosa, Johannes Gualbertus. Numerous other examples will be found figured in Ongania's 'Arte della Stampa,' though the careful student will soon discover that the initial letters with which its pages are crowded are usually fitted into any spaces which chance to be vacant, and often have no connection of any kind with the larger reproductions which they adjoin. Thus their source can seldom be traced with certainty.

6. FROM THE 'VALLISUMBROSA MISSAL,' PRINTED BY GIUNTA AT VENICE, 1503

With the exception of some portrait-initials at Pavia, of which Dr. Paul Kristeller has written in 'Bibliographica,' vol. i. p. 356 sq., and a few English ones of which we shall speak later, the initials in these Venetian Service-books are the last of any importance in which the artist has endeavoured to combine picture and letter into an harmonious design. The artists of the Renaissance, unlike their craftsman predecessors, had no feeling for book-work as such, and it must be confessed that the printers repaid them by printing their delicate work with a carelessness which in most cases completely obscures it. Henceforth the predominant type of pictorial initial is one in which a plain Roman capital is imposed upon a picture to which it has no artistic relation, and which it often cruelly mutilates. Moreover, while the reasonable preference for small books over bulky folios carried with it a great reduction in the size of initials, the refusal of the artists to simplify their designs, so as to accommodate them to these narrower limits resulted in an absolute waste of much fine work. Thus for the famous Holbein initials which came into use at Basel about 1520 I must refer my readers to the illustrations in 'Butsch,' which, good as they are, do not encourage me to attempt fresh reproductions. Even in the original books in which the initials appear, much of the delicacy of the designs is hopelessly lost, for it was impossible that a little picture, often of less than an inch square, however carefully cut, should be adequately rendered when printed in a page of type by workmen who had already lost much of the cunning, or rather much of the capacity for taking pains, of the early masters of the craft.

The new school of designers cast aside, as a rule, any attempt to suit their pictures to the subject of any particular books, taking instead some one theme or idea which they illustrated through all the letters of the alphabet. Thus we have the Child Alphabet and Peasant Alphabet of Holbein, and the same master's still more famous 'Dance of Death' designed for letters slightly larger than the previous ones, but yet no more than an inch square. The alphabet by the Master I. F. is more than a half as large again as this, and is the most decorative of any, the pictures being drawn in relief against a black ground. The early letters of this alphabet illustrate the labours of Hercules, whose name and that of his antagonists are inscribed upon them. When Hercules was exhausted, the artist seems to have fallen back on the Scriptures, his R representing Lot, his S Balaam, and so on.

These Basel initials, which appear chiefly in books printed by Froben, Bebel, Cratander, and Froschover, were no doubt the parents of the small pictorial initials which soon became popular in Germany, Italy, and England. Their development in Germany may be traced in the pages of Butsch, while the Italian initials of the middle of the sixteenth century have already been dealt with in 'Bibliographica' in Mr. A. J. Butler's interesting article (vol. i. pp. 418-27). No one, however, as far as I am aware, has endeavoured to trace the history of pictorial initials in our own country, and I hope that the notes which I have been able to bring together on this part of the subject, scanty as they are, may yet prove of some use as a beginning.

As Mr. Butler has shown, the idea of the Italian alphabets is that the subject of each picture should begin with the letter which is imposed upon it. In a scriptural set A may show us Abraham, B Babel or Balaam, C Cain; in a mythological, A may be Ajax, B Bucephalus, C a Centaur, and so with other subjects. In isolated instances we may trace this connection between letter and word at a much earlier period. Thus in the Lubeck 'Josephus' besides the large initials there is also a much smaller D enclosing a picture of David, and it is at least possible that the choice of the picture was suggested by the letter being the initial of David's name. The novelty to which Mr. Butler drew attention consists in the application of this system of illustration through an entire alphabet, and I have found no good reason for challenging his claim that this novelty originated in Italy. If it is to stand, however, we must put back the first occurrence of these letters to some years before 1546, which is the first positive date he mentions, for in the first Greek book printed in England, the 'Homiliae Duae' of S. Chrysostom, published by Reyner Wolf in August 1543, there are four initials which, despite some difficulties as to two of them, probably belong to this class. The letters are (i) a D, here figured, which obviously stands for Diogenes, (ii) an H (used as a Greek eta) showing Eli (or Heli) and Samuel, (iii) a K, here figured, representing the fountain of En-hakkore which sprang at Samson's prayer from the jaw-bone of the ass, with which he had slain the thousand Philistines, and (iv) a Q (repeated) depicting the Judgment of Solomon. Despite the existence of two K's in En-hakkore, and the possibility of the Q standing for Quaestio or Querimonia, the difficulty of fitting the right words to these letters makes it possible that the propriety of the D and H may be accidental, but on the whole the probability is the other way.

7. D AND K FROM THE 'HOMILIAE' DUAE OF S. CHRYSOSTOM, PRINTED BY R. WOLFE. LONDON, 1543

The interesting question now arises where did Wolfe get these letters, which have all the appearance of being used here for the first time? Their similarity to the letters to which attention was first called by Mr. Butler is so great that we can hardly doubt that, directly or indirectly, they are of Italian origin. But the introduction of gold-tooling into England by Berthelet, examples of which occur on books printed as early as 1541, was undoubtedly effected through Italian workmen, and it is quite possible that these letters were cut in England by Italians living in this country. If, however, further investigation should prove that they were imported, they may help us to determine from what quarter Wolfe obtained his Greek type, of which no complete fount had hitherto existed in England.

Six years after the 'Chrysostom' we find traces, in the edition by Whitchurch (March 1549) of the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI., of another set of scriptural initials of the same character. The four letters which I have noted are an A (Abraham and Isaac), a B (Balaam), an I (Jacob's dream), and an O (Olofernes). The letters are all very much worn, so that the pictures in many instances are barely decipherable.