too, he would discern little difference in literature or in design; everywhere he would find the unevenness of Gothic taste--one moment creating works with a certain boldness and grandeur of conception, the next moment falling into the inane and the ludicrous; everywhere German realism making each person appear as if born in a Rhine city, and each event as if taking place within its walls; everywhere, too, an ever-widening interest in the affairs of past times and distant countries, in the thought and life of the generations that were gone, in the pursuits of the living, and the multiform problems of that age of the Reformation then coming on. It is impossible to turn from this wide survey without a recognition of the large share which wood-engraving, as the suggester and servant of printing, had in the progress made toward civilization in the North during that century. Woltmann does not over-state the fact when he says: “Wood-engraving and copperplate-engraving were not alone of use in the advance of art; they form an epoch in the entire life of mind and culture. The idea embodied and multiplied in pictures became, like that embodied in the printed word, the herald of every intellectual movement.” [Illustration: FIG. 12.--Jews Sacrificing a Christian Child. From Schedel’s “Liber Chronicarum.” Nuremberg, 1493.] As typography spread from Germany through the other countries of Europe, the art of wood-engraving accompanied it. The first books printed in the French language appeared about 1475, at Bruges, where the Dukes of Burgundy had long favored the vulgar tongue, and had collected many manuscripts written in it in their great library, then one of the finest in Europe. The first French city to issue French books from its presses was Lyons, which had learned the arts of printing and of wood-engraving from Basle, Geneva, and Nuremberg, in consequence of their close commercial relations. If a few doubtful and scattered examples of early work be excepted, it was in these Lyonese books that French wood-engraving first appeared. From the beginning of printing in France, Lyons was the chief seat of popular literature, and the centre of the industry of printing books in the vulgar tongue, as Paris was the chief seat of the literature of the learned, both in Latin and French, and devoted itself to reproducing religious and scientific works.[32] At the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the Lyonese presses issued the largest number of first editions of the popular romances, which were sought, not merely by French purchasers, but throughout Europe. These books were meant for the middle class, who were unable to buy the costly manuscripts, illuminated with splendid miniatures, in which literature had previously been locked up. They were not considered valuable enough to be preserved with care, and have consequently become scarce; but they were published in great numbers,