[23] An M with a bear’s tooth, and two others, a D representing a saint sitting on the desert with what looks like a monkey (perhaps St. Roch and his dog), and an O with an angel with large wings, are to be found in the _Tractatus Consultatorii Venerandi Magistri Henrici de Gorychum_, printed by Quentell, ‘anno supra Jubileum tertio.’ These initials are generally too smudgy to be copied. In this same book, the chapter ‘De Observatione Festorum’ commences with the O with a fool’s head. Grüninger’s finest picture-book is probably his splendid edition of Virgil, with engravings by Brandt, the author of the _Ship of Fools_. In this work he makes use of nearly all the letters of this smaller historiated alphabet, which are also found afterwards constantly in his impressions, and particularly in the publications of the reformer, Geyler von Kaisersperg. In these, many of the initials, as is only appropriate, represent religious subjects--David and his harp, St. Sebastian full of arrows, and in a slightly different style, St. Laurence carrying his own gridiron. Two of them are framed. One of these represents Adam and Eve; the other, a D with a charming little love-scene, would seem frequently to have excited the reprobation of devout readers, for in three different works we have found this initial defaced almost beyond recognition. A larger initial of the unframed series, representing a swordsman, we have only met with in the 1501 edition of Boethius, _De Philosophico consolatu sive de consolatione Philosophiae_, etc., with commentaries of St. Thomas. Grüninger’s largest letters would appear to have been reserved exclusively for Geyler’s publications. We have seen them in a great many of his books of sermons and nowhere else. They are most numerous in his _Evangelia_, where there are between thirty and forty different varieties, but even then they do not constitute a complete alphabet, as Geyler’s sermons most often commence with the word _der_ or _die_, the letter D occurring as frequently as all the others together, and several other letters much more often than the remainder. Geyler and Grüninger were evidently made to write and publish for one another, for whilst the preacher often loses the thread of his subject in amusing but not always relevant anecdotes, the printer would seem to have set up his copy much on the same principle, embellishing the sermons with illustrations, many of which, inserted apparently at haphazard, are entirely foreign to the subject. In one of these collections, for instance, there are a number of cuts from the Virgil.[24] [24] Geyler von Kaisersperg was one of the most curious figures of the fifteenth century, a precursor of Luther, a ‘free preacher,’ and for the first twenty years of the sixteenth century his sermons were published by nearly every printer in Strasburg, as well as by many others in Basle and other towns.