In these letters, the fool who saith in his heart there is no God (_Dixit insipiens_), is represented in the D which begins the Psalm as a jester, which is not quite appropriate. In the Mallermi Bible, where there is instead of an historiated letter a little cut, the rendering is more correct. The fool is there, a man with dishevelled hair, and having every appearance of having lost his reason. The C with Absalom hanging by his hair is reproduced as an example of Basle woodcutting in Muther’s _Bücherillustration_. There is amongst these initials a nondescript kind of letter which is an example of the carelessness that sometimes occurred in the workshop. It was intended for an E, but the draughtsman forgot that the drawing would be reversed in the printing, and the printer has arranged matters in the text by turning the letter upside down. In a former essay (_The Library_, 1901) we gave three specimens--S, T, and V--from a book entitled _Liber Decretorum sive panormia_, etc. etc., as examples of Furter’s ornamentation. Letters of this alphabet occur also in an extremely rare book unknown to Hain, without date or name of printer, but undoubtedly printed at Basle, the _Decreta Consilii Basiliensis_. It is, however, certain that they were used in a work printed at Besançon some ten years before the _Liber Decretorum_, and although the fifth volume of Claudin’s _Histoire de l’Imprimerie en France_ in which this work was to be described has not yet appeared, we have reason to believe that they are to be attributed to this town, and were to be given in the chapter in which it is mentioned. We shall have to refer later to the frequency of the repetition in some volumes of the same initial. In the German Bibles, for instance, the different books most often begin by the word ‘Der,’ and consequently by an initial D. In a book of sermons by that extraordinarily fertile writer, Geyler von Kaisersperg, not only does every section commence with the letter D, but with the same identical initial. In this volume, the _Christianliche Bilgerschaft_, printed by Adam Petri in 1512, the preface begins by a floral letter of no consequence. After that the D, with a pilgrim and a cross on his shoulder, is repeated at the commencement of every chapter, possibly thirty times. The title-page has an illustration by Urs Graf with the same subject. The last years of the fifteenth century had passed away, but the German printers, including even Ratdolt, who had returned to Augsburg from Venice, still resisted the influence of Renaissance art. In the _Narrenschiff_ of Brandt of 1493 we can see the science of the draughtsmen excellently interpreted, but the Gothic _facture_ still holds good against the encroachment of more modern artistic tendencies, and it is not until towards 1512 or 1513 that the new ideas begin to be more generally accepted.