These fine volumes, printed by Spottiswoode and Shaw, have a particularly clean and clear type-page, and are excellent in press-work. It is not the type, however, that demands our especial attention, but the illustrations with which the work is liberally furnished. These distinguish it from anything we have hitherto seen in our list of books. The plates and cuts, made by various processes, mezzo-tinting, lithography, line engraving and wood-cutting, mark most clearly the advance in bookmaking which had taken place within the half century. Hitherto we have had illustrations for their own sakes, or for the ornamentation of the books they are in, and depending for their existence solely upon the liberality and intelligence of the publisher; but here we have illustrations introduced into the book for the sake of the text, of which they are an integral part. Ruskin's own words about them, as found in the Preface, are instructive: "It was of course inexpedient to reduce drawings of crowded details to the size of an octavo volume,--I do not say impossible, but inexpedient; requiring infinite pains on the part of the engraver, with no result except farther pain to the beholder. And as, on the other hand, folio books are not easy reading, I determined to separate the text and the unreduceable plates. I have given, with the principal text, all the illustrations absolutely necessary to the understanding of it, and, in the detached work, such additional text as had special reference to the larger illustrations. "A considerable number of these larger plates were at first intended to be executed in tinted lithography; but, finding the result unsatisfactory, I have determined to prepare the principal subjects for mezzotinting,--a change of method requiring two new drawings to be made for every subject; one a carefully penned outline for the etcher, and then a finished drawing upon the etching.... "For the illustrations of the body of the work itself, I have used any kind of engraving which seemed suited to the subjects--line and mezzotint, on steel, with mixed lithographs and woodcuts, at a considerable loss of uniformity in the appearance of the volume, but, I hope, with advantage, in rendering the character of the architecture it describes."