The manner in which Papillon recovered his memoranda of the works of the Cunio is remarkable. In consequence of those curious notes being mislaid for upwards of thirty-five years, the sole record of the productions of those “ingenious and amiable twins” was very nearly lost to the world. The _three sheets of letter-paper_ on which he had written an account of certain old volumes of wood engravings,--that containing the cuts executed by the Cunio being one of the number,--he had lost for upwards of thirty-five years. For long he had only a confused idea of those sheets, though he had often searched for them in vain, when he was writing his first essay on wood engraving, which was printed about 1737, but never published. At length he accidentally found them, on All-Saints’ Day, 1758, rolled up in a bundle of specimens of paper-hangings which had been executed by his father. The finding of those three sheets afforded him the greater pleasure, as from them he discovered, by means of a pope’s name, an epoch of engraving figures and letters on wood for the purpose of being printed, which was certainly much earlier than _any_ at that period known in Europe, and at the same time a history relative to this subject equally curious and interesting. He says that he had so completely forgotten all this,--though he had so often recollected to search for his memoranda,--that he did not deign to take the least notice of it in his previously printed history of the art. The following is a faithful abstract of Papillon’s account of his discovery of those early specimens of wood engraving. The title-page, as given by him in French from Monsieur De Greder’s _vivâ voce_ translation of the original,--which was “en mauvais Latin ou ancien Italien Gothique, avec beaucoup d’abréviations,”--is translated without abridgment, as are also his own descriptions of the cuts. “When young, being engaged with my father in going almost every day to hang rooms with our papers, I was, some time in 1719 or 1720, at the village of Bagneux, near Mont Rouge, at a Monsieur De Greder’s, a Swiss captain, who had a pretty house there. After I had papered a small room for him, he ordered me to cover the shelves of his library with paper in imitation of mosaic. One day after dinner he surprised me reading a book, which occasioned him to show me some very old ones which he had borrowed of one of his friends, a Swiss officer,[I-37] that he might examine them at his leisure. We talked about the figures which they contained, and of the antiquity of wood engraving; and what follows is a description of those ancient books as I wrote it before him, and as he was so kind as to explain and dictate to me. [Footnote I-37: A Monsieur Spirchtvel, as Papillon informs us. Tom. i. p. 92.]