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 PaulII. (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. 356sq., 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 Rrepresenting 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 Greeketa) 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 EdwardVI., 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.

Of the next pictorial alphabet in English books I have lately been surprised to find one letter in a proclamation printed by Berthelet in 1546, my previous acquaintance of it beginning with books printed more than ten years later. The pictures in this alphabet are all signed with an A, at the top of which is a little projection suggesting that it stands for the monogram of A. S. My friend Mr. Sayle has found initials with this signature in books printed during the reign of Elizabeth and JamesI., which nearly make up a complete alphabet, with some letters in duplicate. According to Bryant and Nägler, the engraver Anton Sylvius, who was born at Antwerp in 1526, and worked for Plantin from 1550 to 1573, used the monogram I have described. But I am not wholly satisfied that this A. S. is the same man.

8. PICTORIAL INITIAL ATTRIBUTEDTO ANTON SYLVIUS

Another point of some difficulty is whether the pictures have any relation to the letters. Some of them come in very neatly, thus E and Europa riding on her bull, M and Mercury, T and a lady, who may very well be Thetis, haranguing a council of Gods, another T with Neptune flourishing a very prominent Trident, go well enough together, but why should a W be illustrated by Hercules and Cacus, or an F by Cephalus and Procris, or an I by the birth of Adonis? On the whole, pending further explanations, it would seem that to connect letter and subject was regarded by the designers rather as desirable than essential.

The same point arises as to a much clumsier pictorial alphabet, with large figures in it, found in books and proclamations, printed from 1547 onwards. Here the picture belonging to the T is of Christ and the Tribute-money, but the pictures in other letters seem part of a set illustrating the works of mercy (visiting prisoners, healing the wounded, etc.) and to have no special appropriateness to their initials.

9. HERALDIC INITIAL FROM GRAFTON'SEDITION OF 'HALL.' LONDON, 1548

In 1554 we find Cawood in possession of both of these sets of initials. He had obtained the first apparently from Berthelet, and the second from Grafton. The ruder set seems to have soon fallen into disuse, though I find some letters from it in the possession of John Day in 1563, but that of A. S. (individual letters being re-cut as need arose) was passed on to Barker, when he became Queen's Printer, and reappears in several books of the seventeenth century.

In 1548, in Grafton's edition of Hall's 'Union of the Families of Lancashire and York,' we find a new experiment in the form of heraldic initials. The dedication to EdwardVI. begins with a large O, measuring 2¾ inches each way, and containing the very elaborate arms of the author himself; the records of the reigns of HenryIV.,V., andVIII., with an open H; that of HenryVI. with a D, of EdwardIV. with a P, and of HenryVII. with a fine C (fig. 9), each letter containing the king's arms.

10. FROM A BIBLE PRINTED BYJOHN DAY. LONDON, 1551. 4TO.

In 1551, in the quarto Bible printed by John Day, the dedication to EdwardVI. by Edmond Becke begins with a really excellent pictorial E (shown in fig. 10), representing the offer of a copy to the king. As in the case of the initials for Hall's 'Chronicle,' this design must have been specially prepared for the book, and therefore presumably in England, so that we need not set down other letters too freely as importations from abroad.

11. HERALDIC INITIAL CONTAINING THEARMS OF DUDLEY OF LEICESTER12. INITIAL SIGNED I. D.13. INITIAL SIGNED I. B.11-13. INITIALS FROM CUNNINGHAM'S'COSMOGRAPHICAL GLASS,' PRINTED BYJOHN DAY, 1559

11. HERALDIC INITIAL CONTAINING THEARMS OF DUDLEY OF LEICESTER

12. INITIAL SIGNED I. D.

13. INITIAL SIGNED I. B.

11-13. INITIALS FROM CUNNINGHAM'S'COSMOGRAPHICAL GLASS,' PRINTED BYJOHN DAY, 1559

In 1559, in Cunningham's 'Cosmographical Glass,' printed for him by John Day, there are several large initials, very good of their kind and very well printed. The heraldic D, which is peculiarly graceful, contains the arms of the Earl of Leicester, to whom the book is dedicated. The pictorial I and L (here shown) are both signed, the former I. D., a signature which recurs on several of the illustrations, the latter I. B., who was also the designer of the border to the title-page. An effort seems to have been made to get Dudley's arms into a D, as the opening allusion to Daedalus is certainly dragged in by the shoulders. The other two letters shown, probably have reference to the subject of the book, the Preface, in which the I is found, laying especial stress on the importance of Cosmography in war. The other pictorial initials in the book are an S, in which one man is pointing to a sun-dial and another to the sun (signed with a monogram of a C and a small I within it), an A with a procession of satyrs by the same artist, and a T showing sea-gods navigating a ship (signed H).

It is thus obvious that several designers, or engravers, were at work about this time on pictorial initials, though it will probably be found no easy matter to identify them.

In 1563 most of the letters from the 'Cosmographical Glass' are found again in the very rare edition of the music to Sternhold and Hopkins' metrical version of the Psalms, also printed by Day. In the four parts of the book there are three other initials of the same character, a W representing the battle of the Pigmies and the Cranes, a P of Hercules in the garden of the Hesperides, and an R with a hunting-scene (signed with the monogram C. I.). All are excellent.

Two or three more examples of these large initials will bring to a close my notes of those which I have been able to find in English books of this period, though doubtless others are awaiting the research of future investigators. In the first edition of Ascham's 'Scholemaster,' printed by Day in 1570, the large S is repeated from the 'Cosmographical Glass,' and shows some signs of wear. Another letter of a slightly larger size by the same designer is found prefixed to the 'History of Ireland' in the 1577 edition of 'Holinshed' printed by Harrison. This is a T, and the picture it contains shows an astronomer, whom we may perhaps reasonably identify with Ptolemy. If so, we may remember that his name used to be spelt all over Europe with the omission of its first letter, though the true form seems to be that used in English books of the period.

14. FROM ASCHAM'S 'SCHOLEMASTER,'PRINTED BY JOHN DAY, 1570

The other pictorial initial in the 1577 'Holinshed'[15]is the largest I have found in any English book, measuring nearly three and a half inches each way. The letter is an I, the subject of the picture the Creation, and it is conceivable that, though we find it in an English history, it was originally intended for the first page of a Great Bible, in which it would fitly have illustrated the words 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' It is possible, indeed, that this applicability to a particular text may sometimes have been taken as a motive, when it was found difficult to establish a connection between the initial and the subject of a picture as summed up in any single word. Thus a W, which is found in Cawood's books in connection with the A. S. initials, represents the passage of the Red Sea, and irresistibly reminds us of the verse 'When Israel came out of Egypt,' though not of the word Exodus.

Some very fine heraldic initials still remain to be noticed. The initials in the early editions of the English Bible are disappointing, but in the first and second editions of the so-called 'Bishops' Bible,' printed by Jugge in 1568 and 1572, special attention seems to have been paid to them, and besides many small pictorial and decorative letters of interest, there are some really fine examples of heraldic designs. The owners of the arms which I have identified are Archbishop Cranmer, Archbishop Parker, Cecil, Dudley, and Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford. Parker's arms are exhibited in several different letters, generally with his initials M. C. (Matthew of Canterbury) and the date. The form of these heraldic letters is usually graceful, and they are much more easily justifiable on artistic grounds than the pictorial initials at which we have been looking.

The title-pages of the 'Bishops' Bible' are adorned with copper-engravings of some merit of Elizabeth herself, Cecil, and Dudley. One of these, I regret to say, has been turned into an initial at the beginning of the Psalms by the simple device of giving Lord Burleigh a large Roman B to hold in his hand. A less violent and more successful effort after a portrait-initial is here shown from the edition of Foxe's 'Actes and Monumentes,' printed by Day in 1576. Another portrait-initial of the Queen is found in an E, which heads one of her Proclamations printed by Purfoot, and an inferior one in an F in another Proclamation printed by Barker.

15. FROM FOXE'S 'ACTES AND MONUMENTES,' PRINTED BY JOHN DAY, 1576

Some of the heraldic initials of the first and second editions of the 'Bishops' Bible' are repeated, with some additional ones of smaller size, in the 1573 edition. Parker's arms are also to be found in the edition of 'Matthew Paris' issued under his patronage in 1571, Cecil's in the 1577 'Holinshed' already mentioned, and it is probable that a good many others may be discovered. It seems to me, indeed, that students of the history of English printing have hardly paid the attention it deserves to the work of the forty years from 1540 to 1580. The printers and bookmen of this period were not distinguished by much originality, or by delicate artistic taste, but they were men of considerable enterprise, and their interest in their books was great and genuine. This interest and enterprise left a very distinctive mark on the types, the illustrations and the bindings of the books of the period, and though the ideas which underlie them were mostly borrowed from abroad, they were developed with a certain freedom and largeness which are not without their effect.

THERE are so many gaps in our knowledge of the history of books in England that we can hardly claim that our own dwelling is set in order, and yet many of our bookmen appear more inclined to re-decorate their neighbour's houses than to do work that still urgently needs to be done at home. The reasons for this transference of energy are not far to seek. It is quite easy to be struck with the inferiority of English books and their accessories, such as bindings and illustrations, to those produced in the same centuries on the Continent. Thus to compare the books printed by Caxton with the best work of his German or Italian contemporaries, to compare the books bound for Henry, Prince of Wales, with those bound for the Kings of France, to try to find even a dozen English books printed before 1640 with woodcuts (not imported from abroad) of any real artistic merit—if any one is anxious to reinforce his national modesty, here are three very efficacious methods of doing it! On the other hand, English book-collectors have always been cosmopolitan in their tastes, and without leaving England it is possible to study to some effect, in public or private libraries, the finest books of almost any foreign country. It is small wonder, therefore, that our bookmen, when they have been minded to write on their hobbies, have sought beauty and stateliness of work where they could most readily find them, and that the labourers in the bookfield of our own country are not numerous. Touchstone's remark, 'a poor thing, but mine own,' might, on the worst view of the case, have suggested greater diligence at home; but on a wider view English book-work is by no means a 'poor thing.' Its excellence at certain periods is as striking as its inferiority at others, and it is a literal fact that there is no art or craft connected with books in which England, at one time or another, has not held the primacy in Europe.

It would certainly be unreasonable to complain that printing with movable types was not invented at a time better suited to our national convenience. Yet the fact that the invention was made just in the middle of the fifteenth century constituted a handicap by which the printing trade in this country was for generations overweighted. At almost any earlier period, more particularly from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the first quarter of the fifteenth, England would have been as well equipped as any foreign country to take its part in the race. From the production of Queen Mary's Psalter at the earlier date to that of the Sherborne Missal at the later, English manuscripts, if we may judge from the scanty specimens which the evil days of HenryVIII. and EdwardVI. have left us, may vie in beauty of writing and decoration with the finest examples of Continental art. If John Siferwas, instead of William Caxton, hadintroduced printing into England, our English incunabula would have taken a far higher place. But the sixty odd years which separate the two men were absolutely disastrous to the English book-trade. Already exhausted by the futile war with France, England was torn asunder by the wars of the Roses, and by the time these were ended the school of illumination, so full of promise, and seemingly so firmly established, had absolutely died out. When printing was introduced England possessed no trained illuminators or skilful scribes such as in other countries were obliged to make the best of the new art in order not to lose their living, nor were there any native wood-engravers ready to illustrate the new books. I have never myself seen or heard of a 'Caxton' in which an illuminator has painted a preliminary border or initial letters; even the rubrication, where it exists, is usually a disfigurement; while as for pictures, it has been unkindly said that inquiry whence they were obtained is superfluous, since any boy with a knife could have cut them as well.

Making its start under these unfavourable conditions, the English book-trade was exposed at once to the full competition of the Continental presses, RichardIII. expressly excluding it from the protection which was given to other industries. Practically all learned books of every kind, the great majority of our service-books, most grammars for use in English schools, and even a few popular books of the kind to which Caxton devoted himself, were produced abroad for the English market and freely imported. Only those who mistake the shadow for the substance will regret this free trade, to which we owe the development of scholarship in England during the sixteenth century. None the less, it was hard on a young industry, and though Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, the Faques, Berthelet, Wolfe, John Day, and others produced fine books in England during the sixteenth century, the start given to the Continental presses was too great, and before our printers had fully caught up their competitors, they too were seized with the carelessness and almost incredible bad taste which marks the books of the first half of the seventeenth century in every country of Europe.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, as is well known, the French thought sufficiently well of Baskerville's types to purchase a fount after his death for the printing of an important edition of the works of Voltaire. But the merits of Baskerville as a printer, never very cordially admitted, are now more hotly disputed than ever; and if I am asked at what period English printing has attained that occasional primacy which I have claimed for our exponents of all the bookish arts, I would boldly say that it possesses it at the present day. On the one hand, the Kelmscott Press books and those of the Doves Press, on their own lines, are the finest and most harmonious which have ever been produced; on the other, the book-work turned out in the ordinary way of business by the five or six leading printers of England and Scotland seems to me, both in technical qualities and in excellence of taste, the finest in the world, and with no rival worth mentioning, except in the work of one or two of the best firms in the United States. Moreover, as far as I can learn, it is only in GreatBritain and America that the form of books is now the subject of the ceaseless experiment and ingenuity which are the signs of a period of artistic activity.

As regards book-illustration the same claim may be put forward, though with a little more hesitation. We have been taught lately, with insistence, that 'the sixties' marked an epoch in English art, solely from the black and white work in illustrated books. At that period our book-pictures are said to have been the best in the world; unfortunately our book-decoration, whether better or worse than that of other countries, was almost unmitigatedly bad. In the last quarter of a century our decorative work has improved in the most striking manner; our illustrations, if judged merely for their pictorial qualities, have not advanced. In the eyes of artists the sketches for book-work now being produced in other countries are probably as good as our own. But an illustration is not merely a picture, it is a picture to be placed in a certain position in a printed book, and in due relation to the size of the page and the character of the type. English book-illustrators by no means always realise this distinction, yet there is on the whole a greater feeling for these proprieties in English books than in those of other countries, and this is an important point in estimating merits. Another important point is that the rule of the 'tint' or 'half-tone' block, with its inevitable accompaniment of loaded paper, ugly to the eye and heavy in the hand, though it has seriously damaged English illustrated work, has not yet gained the predominance it has in other countries. Our best illustrated books are printed from line-blocks, and there are even signs of a possible revival of artistic wood-engraving.

In endeavouring to make good my assertion of what I have called the occasional primacy of English book-work, I am not unaware of the danger of trying, or seeming to try, to play the strains of 'Rule Britannia' on my own poor penny whistle. As regards manuscripts, therefore, it is a pleasure to be able to seek shelter behind the authority of Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, whose words in this connection carry all the more weight, because he has shown himself a severe critic of the claims which have been put forward on behalf of several fine manuscripts to be regarded as English. In the closing paragraphs of his monograph on 'English Illuminated Manuscripts' he thus sums up the pretensions of the English school:—

'The freehand drawing of our artists under the Anglo-Saxon kings was incomparably superior to the dead copies from Byzantine models which were in favour abroad. The artistic instinct was not destroyed, but rather strengthened, by the incoming of Norman influence; and of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is abundant material to show that English book-decoration was then at least equal to that of neighbouring countries. For our art of the early fourteenth century we claim a still higher position, and contend that no other nation could at that time produce such graceful drawing. Certainly inferior to this high standard of drawing was the work of the latter part of that century; but still, as we have seen, in the miniatures of this time we have examples of a rising school of painting which bid fair to attain to a high standard of excellence, and which only failed for political causes.'[17]

To this judicial pronouncement on the excellence of English manuscripts on their decorative side, we may fairly add the fact that manuscripts of literaryimportance begin at an earlier date in England than in any other country, and that the Cotton MS. of 'Beowulf' and the miscellanies which go by the names of the 'Exeter Book' and the 'Vercelli Book,' have no contemporary parallels in the rest of Europe.

When we turn from books, printed or in manuscript, to their possessors, it is only just to begin with a compliment to our neighbours across the Channel. No English bookman holds the unique position of Jean Grolier, andles femmes bibliophilesof England have been few and undistinguished compared with those of France. Grolier, however, and his fair imitators, as a rule, bought only the books of their own day, giving them distinction by the handsome liveries which they made them don. Our English collectors have more often been of the omnivorous type, and though Lords Lumley and Arundel in the sixteenth century cannot, even when their forces are joined, stand up against De Thou, in Sir Robert Cotton, Harley, Thomas Rawlinson, Lord Spencer, Heber, Grenville, and Sir Thomas Phillipps (and the list might be doubled without much relaxation of the standard), we have a succession of English collectors to whom it would be difficult to produce foreign counterparts. Round thesedii majoreshave clustered innumerable demigods of the book-market, and certainly in no other country has collecting been as widely diffused, and pursued with so much zest, as in England during the present century. It is to be regretted that so few English collectors have cared to leave their marks of ownership on the books they have taken so much pleasure in bringing together. Michael Wodhull was a model in this respect, for his book-stamp is one of the most pleasing of English origin, and his autograph notes recording the prices he paid for his treasures, and his assiduous collation of them, make them doubly precious in the eyes of subsequent owners. Mr. Grenville also had his book-stamp, though there is little joy to be won from it, for it is unpleasing in itself, and is too often found spoiling a fine old binding. Mr. Cracherode's stamp was as graceful as Wodhull's; but, as a rule, our English collectors, though, as is shown elsewhere in this volume, many more of them than is generally known have possessed a stamp, have not often troubled to use it, and their collections have never obtained the reputation which they deserve, mainly for lack of marks of ownership to keep them green in the memory of later possessors. That this should be so in a country where book-plates have been so common may at first seem surprising. But book-plates everywhere have been used rather by the small collectors than the great ones, and the regrettable peculiarity of our English bookmen is, not that they despised this rather fugitive sign of possession, but that for the most part they despised book-stamps as well.

Of book-plates themselves I have no claim to speak; but for good taste and grace of design the best English Jacobean and Chippendale specimens seem to me the most pleasing of their kind, and certainly in our own day the work of Mr. Sherborne has no rival, except in that of Mr. French, who, in technique, would, I imagine, not have refused to call himself his disciple.

Turning lastly to bindings, the first point which may fairly be made is that England is the only country besides France in which the art has been consistently pursued with success through many centuries, and that in length of pedigree it far surpasses even France herself. Early in the twelfth century, if not before, the Winchester bookmen turned their attention also to leather-binding, and the school of design which they started, spreading to London, Durham, and Oxford, did not die out until it was ousted by the large panel stamps introduced from France at the end of the fifteenth century. During the first half of this period the English leather-binders were the finest in Europe; during the second, the Germans pressed them hard, and when the large panel stamps, three or four inches square and more, were introduced in Holland and France, the English adaptations of them were distinctly inferior to the originals. The earliest English bindings with gold tooling were, of course, also imitative. The use of gold reached this country but slowly, as the first known English binding, in which it occurs, is on a book printed in 1541, by which time the art had been common in Italy for a generation. The English bindings found on books bound for HenryVIII., EdwardVI., and MaryI., all of which are roughly assigned to Berthelet as the Royal binder, resemble the current Italian designs of the day, with sufficient differences to make it probable that they were produced by Englishmen. We know, however, that until the close of the century there were occasional complaints of the presence of foreign binders in London, and it is probable that the Grolieresque bindings executed for Wotton were foreign rather than English. Where, however, we find work on English books distinctly unlike anything in France or Italy, it is reasonable to assign it to a native school, and such a school seems to have grown up about 1570, in the workshop of John Day, the helper of Archbishop Parker in so many of his literary undertakings. These bindings attributed to Day, especially those in which he worked with white leather on brown, although they have none of the French delicacy of tooling, may fairly be said to attack the problem of decoration with a greater sense of the difference between the styles suitable for a large book and a small than is always found in France, where the greatest binders, such as Nicholas Eve and Le Gascon, often covered large folios with endless repetitions of minute tools, whose full beauty can only be appreciated on small decimos or octavos. The English designs with a large centre ornament and corner-pieces are rich and impressive, and we may fairly give Day and his fellows the palm for originality and effectiveness among Elizabethan binders. In the next reign the French use of the semis or powder, a single small stamp, of a fleur-de-lys, a thistle, a crown, or the like, impressed in rows all over the cover, was increasingly imitated in England, very unsuccessfully, and, save for a few traces of the style of Day, the leather bindings of the first third of the century deserve the worst epithets which can be given them.

Until, however, French fashions came into vogue after the Restoration, English binders had never been content to regard leather as the sole material in which they could work. Embroidered bindings had come into use in England in the fourteenth century, and in the sixteenth embroidered work was very popular with the Tudor princesses, gold and silver thread and pearls being largely used, often with very decorative effect. The simplest of these are also the best—but, as a rule, much elaboration was employed, and on a presentation copy of Archbishop Parker's 'De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britannicae' we find a clever but rather grotesque representation of a deer-paddock. Under the Stuarts the lighter feather-stitch was preferred, and there seems to have been a regular trade in embroidered Bibles and Prayer-books of small size, sometimes with floral patterns, sometimes with portraits of the King, or Scriptural scenes. A dealer's freak which compelled the British Museum to buy a pair of elaborate gloves of the period rather than lose a finely embroidered Psalter, with which they went, was certainly a fortunate one, enabling us to realise that in hands thus gloved these little bindings, always pretty, often really artistic, must have looked exactly right, while their vivid colours must have been admirably in harmony with the gay Cavalier dresses.

Besides furnishing a ground for embroidery, velvet bindings were often decorated, in England, with goldsmith work. One of the most beautiful little bookcovers in existence is on a book of prayers, bound for Queen Elizabeth in red velvet, with a centre and corner pieces delicately enamelled on gold. Under the Stuarts, again, we frequently find similar ornaments in engraved silver, and their charm is incontestable.

Thus while for English bindings of this period in gilt leather we can only claim that Berthelet's show some freedom in their adaptation of Italian models, and Day's a more decided originality, we are entitled to set side by side with this scanty record a host of charming bindings in more feminine materials, which have no parallel in France, and certainly deserve some recognition. After the Restoration, however, leather quickly ousted its competitors, and a school of designers and gilders arose in England, which, while taking its first inspiration from Le Gascon, soon developed an individual style. In effectiveness, if not in minute accuracy of execution, this may rank with the best in Europe. We can trace the beginnings of this lighter and most graceful work as early as the thirties, and it might be contended with a certain plausibility that it began at the Universities. Certainly the two earliest examples known to me—the copy of her 'Statutes' presented to CharlesI. by Oxford in 1634, and the Little Gidding 'Harmony' of 1635, the tools employed in which have been shown by Mr. Davenport to have been used also by Buck, of Cambridge—are two of the finest English bindings in existence, and in both cases, despite the multiplicity of the tiny tools employed, there is a unity and largeness of design which, as I have ventured to hint, is not always found even in the best French work. The chief English bindings after the Restoration, those associated with the name of Samuel Mearne, the King's binder, preserves this character, though the attempt to break the formality of the rectangle by the bugles at the side and the little penthouses at foot and head (whence its name, the 'cottage' style) was not wholly successful. The use of the labour saving device of the 'roll,' in preference to impressing each section of the pattern by hand, is another blot. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to find an English or Scotch binding of this period which is less than charming, and the best of them are admirable. At the beginning of the eighteenth century a new grace was added by the inlaying of a leather of a second colour. The fine Harleian bindings let us down gently from this eminence, and then, after a period of mere dulness, with the rise of Roger Payne we have again an English school (for Payne's traditions were worthily followed by Charles Lewis) which, by common consent, was the finest of its time.

After Payne and Lewis, English binding, like French, became purely imitative in its designs; but while in our own decade the French artists have endeavoured to shake themselves free from old traditions by mere eccentricity, in England we have several living binders (Mr. Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Douglas Cockerell), who work with notable originality and yet with the strictest observance of the canons of their art.

Moreover in the application of decorative designs to cloth cases, England has invented, and England and America have brought to perfection, an inexpensive and very pleasing form of bookcover, which gives the bookman ample time to consider whether his purchase is worth the more permanent honours of gilded leather, and also, by the facts that it is avowedly temporary, and that its decoration is cheaply and easily effected by large stamps, renders forgivable vagaries of design, which when translated, as they have been of late years in France, into time-honoured and solemn leather, seem merely incongruous and irreverent.

In binding, then, as in the other Bookish Arts, Anglo-Saxondom has no need to be ashamed of its record, while, if we look to the work of the present day, there is good reason to hope that our part in the future may be a still worthier one.

THERE are many points in the history of books and of book-collecting which are still tantalisingly obscure. How little we know about the prices of early books, the cost of printing, the relations of printer and publisher or of publisher and author! With the exception of a few royal personages and a few men and women of great wealth and rank, the book-collectors of the two centuries which succeeded the invention of printing are hardly known to us, even by name. A few have gained immortality among book-lovers by clothing their books in priceless bindings; others, like Sir Thomas Bodley, have won a nobler renown by founding libraries in which students should have free access to their treasures. But of the rank and file of the early collectors, the men who bought books not by the cartload, but with individual thought and care, according to the length of purses easily exhaustible—of these for two centuries we know little or nothing. If it had not been for an indiscreet pamphlet published by an English theologian in Holland, our ignorance about English book-collectors might have lasted indefinitely longer. But during his brief stay in his native land the pamphleteer introduced into this country the custom of selling by auction the books of dead collectors, and from the year 1676, when this practice was first adopted, our knowledge about English libraries becomes abundant.

It is not a little curious in itself that we should be able to say with precision that at nine o'clock of the morning, on October 31, 1676, at the house of Dr. Lazarus Seaman, in Warwick Court, Warwick Lane, began the first book auction that ever took place in England. But we can do much more than this. The little world of book-collectors was immensely taken with this new method of book-buying. The catalogues of the first auctions soon came to be regarded as curiosities, and the price fetched by each lot was carefully recorded. The auctioneers were no less interested. They wrote prefaces to the catalogue of each sale, giving us their reasons for the various auction rules, which soon came to assume a form closely similar to those now in use at Sotheby's or Puttick and Simpson's. Moreover, at the end of ten years Thomas Cooper, the leading auctioneer of the time, printed an exact list of the seventy-three sales which had taken place since the introduction of the practice into England, and eleven years later another famous member of the fraternity wrote the following letter, which has recently been acquired by the British Museum, and supplies us with the one link which was needed to complete our chain of information on the subject.

The letter forms part of the 'Dering Correspondence,' which stretches from the reign of James the First to that of George the Second (Stowe ms. 709). It has the double endorsement: (i) 'Mr. Millington, the noted auctioneer, to Mr. Jos. Hill,' and (ii) 'Millington's letter acknowledginge the usefulnesse of sellinge Libraryes by Auction.' Here is the text of the part which now concerns us:—

'Lond. June 25, 1697.'Reverend Sr,'I have designd severall Times to wait ofsicyou when in England to present my service and tender my thanks for your greatService done to Learning & Learned men in your first advising & effectually setting on foot that admirable & universally approved of way of selling Librarys by Auction amongst us. A son of a worthy ffreind of mine, being now in Rotterdam in order to get some Employment there, offering me the Conveyance of mine to your hand, I presume of your Candour to receive my acknowledgements and gratefull Resentments for the knowledge I have got and the benefit I have received by their management, having for severall yeares strenuously Pursued what you, sire, happilyIntroduced the Practice of into England. I Design you some Catalogues of the Library of DrEdward Bernard, late Astronomy Professor in Oxford, in which you will find Curious Manuscripts, Libri Impressi collati cum Codicibus MSS., etc'

'Lond. June 25, 1697.

'Reverend Sr,

'I have designd severall Times to wait ofsicyou when in England to present my service and tender my thanks for your greatService done to Learning & Learned men in your first advising & effectually setting on foot that admirable & universally approved of way of selling Librarys by Auction amongst us. A son of a worthy ffreind of mine, being now in Rotterdam in order to get some Employment there, offering me the Conveyance of mine to your hand, I presume of your Candour to receive my acknowledgements and gratefull Resentments for the knowledge I have got and the benefit I have received by their management, having for severall yeares strenuously Pursued what you, sire, happilyIntroduced the Practice of into England. I Design you some Catalogues of the Library of DrEdward Bernard, late Astronomy Professor in Oxford, in which you will find Curious Manuscripts, Libri Impressi collati cum Codicibus MSS., etc'

The letter proceeds to enlarge at some length on Dr. Bernard's books, the best part of which, by the way, had been presented to the Bodleian, and then, with an apology for the writer's presumption in addressing Dr. Hill, is duly signed, 'Your obliged humble servant, D. Millington.' It tells us, it will be observed, with the aid of the emphatic underscoring here represented by italics, that it was Dr. Hill who had 'first advised and effectually set on foot that admirable and universally approved of way of selling libraries by auction amongst us,' and we can see exactly how he came to start the practice.

Joseph Hill was one of the most earnest and the most moderate of the seventeenth-century Presbyterians. His father, Joshua, is said to have died a few minutes before the archbishop's apparitor arrived to cite him for not wearing a surplice; but though the objection to Church discipline was thus hereditary, it does not seem to have been intensified in Joseph. A distinguished career at Cambridge was closed by his refusal to take the oath enjoined by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, and the University authorities 'cut his name out of the books in kindness to him,' to prevent his being formally ejected from his offices. Hill took refuge at Leyden, and was soon appointed to the charge of the Scottish Church at Middleburg in Zeeland. But though a refugee, he remained English at heart, and in 1672 wrote a pamphlet, entitled 'The Interest of these United Provinces, being a Defence of the Zeelander's Choice.' It will be remembered that by the secret Treaty of Dover, concluded between CharlesII. and the French king in 1670, Charles was to aid Louis against the Dutch, and receive as part of his reward the province of Zeeland. The French invasion took place in 1672, and it was at this crisis that Hill wrote his pamphlet, which contains a defence of the English king. Though completed on November 30, 1672, it did not appear till April of the next year, when the author at last obtained a publisher, though at the cost of no less a sum than one hundred pounds. In the following August he was ordered to leave Zeeland till the war was over, and on returning to England was rewarded by Charles with a pension of £80, and the offer of a bishopric as the price of his conformity. The offer was declined, and in 1678 Hill returned to Holland, accepting a post at Rotterdam, where we find him when the grateful Millington wrote his letter of acknowledgment in 1695, and where he died in 1707.

When Hill came over to receive the reward of his patriotism in England, he would naturally have revived his acquaintance with an old Cambridge don, Dr. Lazarus Seaman, with whom he had many tastes in common. Seaman had been Master of Peterhouse and Vice-Chancellor of the University. He had written pamphlets endeavouring to keep the Presbyterians in the Church by minimising the importance of episcopal orders, and was just on the right side of the line which shut Hill out from the proffered bishopric. Both were book collectors, both were classical scholars, and when Seaman died during Hill's stay in London, we may be quite sure that Hill was among his mourners.

Seaman's funeral was no small affair. Two broadsides of not wholly despicable verse are still extant to attest his popularity. One is entitled 'An Elegie to the endeared Memory of that Learned and Reverend Minister of the Gospel, Dr. Lazarus Seaman, who died on Friday, the 3rd of September, 1675, and was carried from Drapers' Hall to be interred, with a numerous train of Christian friends bewailing his Death.' The other broadside, which contains the better verse, is more simply inscribed 'An Elegy on the Reverend and Learned Divine, Dr. Lazarus Seaman, sometime Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Master of Peterhouse, and late Minister of the Gospel in All Hallows, Bread Street.' Even of this, however, the first six lines may suffice as a specimen:

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