The dawn of printing was at hand. Manuscripts, whether handsomely embellished or copied simply without ornament, were expensive luxuries which only the rich could purchase. With the revival of learning, for students in general, for the poorer classes, for school children, cheap books costing as little as possible, but serving the same end as the manuscript, were necessary, and the xylograph came at its hour.[4] [4] It should be mentioned that block-books are now considered by some authorities to have come later than the invention of printing with movable type, _i.e._ about 1460. From the earliest times copyists had used stamps[5] and copper stencillings in order to apply initials that recurred frequently, a practice which contains in it the first germ of printing. Playing-cards were printed by the same process and afterwards illuminated. [5] Passavant. Picture-books came next, with text and illustrations cut on the same block, the leaves being printed on one side only, and afterwards gummed back to back. Such was the book known as the _Biblia Pauperum_, ‘Figurae typicae veteris atque antitypicae novi testamenti,’ a short pictorial history in forty leaves of the Old and New Testament. Another of these block-books is devoted to the history of St. John the Evangelist and his apocalyptic dreams, of which there are six different editions, with texts in Flemish, Saxon, and German. The _Ars Moriendi_, or temptations of the dying, with terrifying pictures, shows a moribund man assailed by devils,[6] but, as in all similar productions, the terrible is relieved by a touch of the grotesque. The _Speculum humanae salvationis_ is remarkable for being printed partly from blocks and partly with movable characters. This shows the transition from xylography to printing proper. The printer of this work, in order to economise the composition of twenty-seven leaves, used the blocks he possessed, and printed them together with twenty-seven others composed with movable type. The example is not unique. [6] See, under ‘PARIS,’ the representation of one of these death-scenes in an initial of Chevallon’s. A last variety of xylographic impressions is known under the generic name of ‘Donatus.’ This is a little primer of Latin grammar first compiled by the grammarian Aelius Donatus, by whose name it was afterwards known.