some cause, and never finished.

The utmost on this subject that we can say at present is that as a printer would depend for the sale of his books in the first place on the inhabitants of the town in which he printed, and as these would be

most likely to employ an illuminator from the same place, the predominant style of decoration in any book is likely to be that of the district in which it was printed, and if we find the same style predominant in a number of books this may give us a clue to connect them altogether, or to distinguish them from some other group. In this way, for instance, it is possible that some light may be thrown on the question whether the 36-line Bible was finished at Bamberg or at Mainz. Certainly the clumsy, heavy initials in the British Museum copy are very unlike those which occur in Mainz books, and if this style were found to predominate in other copies we should have an important piece of new evidence on a much debated question. But our knowledge that Schoeffer had an agency for the sale of his books as far off from the place of their printing as Paris, the Italian character of the illuminations added to some of his books, and the occurrence of a note in a book printed in Italy that the purchaser could not wait to have it illuminated there, but entrusted it to a German artist on his return home, may suffice to warn us against any rash conclusion in the present very meagre state of our knowledge.

Apart from the question as to where they were executed, the illuminations in books printed in Germany are not, as a rule, very interesting. Germany was not the home of fine manuscripts during the fifteenth century, and her printed books depend for their beauty on the rich effect of their gothic types,

their good paper and handsome margins, rather than on the accessories added by hand. The attempts of the more ambitious miniaturists to depict, within the limits of an initial, St. Jerome translating the Bible or David playing on the harp, are, for the most part, clumsy and ill-drawn. On the other hand, fairly good scroll-work of flowers and birds is not uncommon. As a rule it surrounds the whole page of text, but in some cases an excellent effect is produced by the stem of the design being brought up between the two columns of a large page, branching out at either end so as to cover the upper and lower margins, those at the sides being left bare. It may be mentioned that much good scroll-work is found on paper copies, the vellum used in early German books being usually coarse and brown, and sometimes showing the imperfections of the skin by holes as large as a filbert, so that it was employed apparently, chiefly for its greater resistance to wear and tear, rather than as a luxurious refinement, as was the case in Italy and France. An extreme instance of the superiority of a paper copy to one on vellum may be found by comparing the coarsely-rubricated 42-line Bible in the Grenville Collection at the British Museum with the very prettily illuminated copy of the same book in the King's Library. The Grenville copy is on vellum, the King's on paper; but my own preference has always been for the latter. Even in Germany, however, good vellum books were sometimes produced, for

the printers endeavoured to match the skins fairly uniformly throughout a volume, and a book-lover of taste would not be slow to pick out the best copy. The finest German vellum book with which I am acquainted is the Lamoignon copy of the 1462 Bible, now in the British Museum. This was specially illuminated for a certain Conradus Dolea, whose name and initials are introduced into the lower border on the first page of the second volume. The scroll-work is excellent, and the majority of the large initials are wisely restricted to simple decorative designs. Only in a few cases, as at the beginning of the Psalms, where David is as usual playing his harp, is the general good taste which marks the volume disturbed by clumsy figure-work.

In turning from the illuminations of the first German books to those printed by Jenson and Vindelinus de Spira at Venice we are confronted with an interesting discovery, first noted by the Vicomte Delaborde in his delightful book La Gravure en Italie avant Marc-Antoine (p. 252), carried a little further in the Bibliographie des Livres à figures Venitiens, written by the Prince d'Essling when he was Duc de Rivoli, then greatly extended by the researches of Dr. Paul Kristeller, some of the results of which, when as yet unpublished, he kindly communicated to me, and finally summed up in the Prince d'Essling's magnificent work, Les Livres à figures Venitiens. In a considerable number—the list given me by Dr. Kristeller enumerated about forty—of

the works published by Jenson and Vindelinus, from 1469 to 1473, the work of the illuminator has been facilitated in some copies by the whole or a portion of his design having been first stamped for him from a block. The evidence of this stamping is partly in the dent made in the paper or vellum, partly in the numerous little breaks in the lines where the block has not retained the ink; but I was myself lucky enough to find in the Grenville copy of the Virgil printed at Venice by Bartholomaeus de Cremona in 1472, an uncoloured example of this stamped work, which was reproduced in Bibliographica, and subsequently by the Prince d'Essling. A copy of the Pliny of 1469 in the Bibliothèque Nationale, illuminated by means of this device, has an upper and inner border of the familiar white elliptical interlacements on a gold and green ground. In the centre of the lower border is a shield supported by two children, and at the feet of each child is a rabbit. The outer border shows two cornucopias on a green and gold ground. The upper and inner borders are repeated again in the Livy and Virgil of 1470, in the Valerius Maximus of 1471, and in the Rhetorica of George of Trebizond of 1472. In this last book it is joined with another border, first found in the De Officiis of Cicero of the same year. All these books proceeded from the press of Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira. A quite distinct set of borders are found in Jenson's edition of Cicero's Epistolae ad Familiares of 1471; but in an article

in the Archivio Storico delle Arti Dr. Kristeller showed that the lower border of the Pliny of 1469, described above, occurs again in a copy of the De Evangelica Praeparatione, printed by Jenson in 1470. The apparent distinction of the blocks used in the books of the two firms is thus broken down, and in face of the rarity of the copies thus decorated in comparison with those illuminated by hand, or which have come down to us with their blank spaces still unfilled, it seems impossible to maintain that either the preliminary engraving or the illumination was done in the printer's workshop. We should rather regard the engraving as a labour-saving device employed by some master illuminator to whom private purchasers sent the books they had purchased from the De Spiras or Jenson for decoration. No instance has as yet been found of a book printed after 1473 being illuminated in this way.[1]

Apart from the special interest of these particular borders, the illumination in early Italian books is almost uniformly graceful and beautiful. Interlacements, oftenest of white upon blue, sometimes of gold upon green, are the form of ornament most commonly met with. Still prettier than these are