On the sixth leaf, the Bride and Bridegroom are eating grapes in a vineyard, three maidens attending, all seated. In the cut below, the Bridegroom is standing outside a garden wall over which the Bride is watching him. An angel is entering the gate, other angels with drawn swords are on the wall. It is supposed that these engravings were executed in the Netherlands: the female figures are said to be in the costume of the Court of Burgundy! There are several shields of arms to be found in three of the subjects, and these have given rise to long dissertations by writers on heraldry. Mr. Chatto's book has engravings of eighteen of them with descriptions. One is the shield of Alsace, another of the house of Würtemberg, a third of the city of Ratisbon; and the cross-keys, the _fleur-de-lis_, the black spread-eagle, and a rose (much like our Tudor rose), may be seen on others. Several copies of the 'Canticum' have been found, coloured and uncoloured. Two editions of the Canticum Canticorum are known; both appear to have emanated from Holland and the Low Countries, and both bear clear traces of the influence of the school of the Van Eycks. The Figure Alphabet.--In the Print Room of the British Museum there is a curious little book (six inches by four inches in size) in which nearly all the letters of the alphabet are formed by grotesque figures of men. Except that it was bequeathed to the Museum by Sir George Beaumont, no one knows anything of its history; but internal evidence warrants us in attributing it to the work of an engraver of the first half of the fifteenth century. The cuts are printed in a kind of sepia-coloured distemper which can be easily wiped off by means of moisture. There is one very curious thing connected with this work. In the cut forming the {25} letter L a young man is leaning on a sword, on the blade of which is plainly written London, and on the cloak of the youth lying below we read, in a current hand usual at that date, the word _Bethemsted_. The figures, grotesque as they are, were drawn by a better artist than those who designed the block books. We know that the art of engraving was in a very low state in England at the time we are speaking of; we should therefore rejoice if we could anyhow prove that these very early specimens of wood-cutting were done in this country. [Illustration] In the letter F, which we have given as an illustration, very much reduced from the original, a tall man is blowing a very long trumpet; a youth, bending down to form the crotch of the letter, is beating a tabor; while a nondescript animal lies couched at his feet. Many other block books exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Spencer Library, Manchester, and in the large libraries on the Continent besides those we have mentioned. Some were printed, long after the introduction of printing, in Venice and in the cities of Lower Germany.