With very few exceptions the decorative and pictorial initials reproduced from foreign books on the preceding pages have been chosen from works printed before 1525, and in most cases before 1500. In Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, schools of cutters and engravers in wood and soft metal with strongly marked local characteristics came into existence before 1490--in Germany some twenty years earlier--and during the last decade of the century numerous finely illustrated books were issued from the chief continental presses. The good work of one country or town might be imitated, slavishly or freely, in another; here and there also the work produced was quaintly or stupidly bad, and good designs were often spoilt by clumsy cutting. But despite all such individual failures, there was abundance of originality and executive skill, and this is true also, though in a less degree, of Switzerland and Spain. When we turn our eyes homewards, we find a totally different state of affairs. The few English illustrated books of the period with which this monograph is mainly concerned have been divided by specialists into three groups:[34] those with cuts borrowed outright from the Netherlands or France (_e.g._ Caxton’s Horae cuts, the illustrations in Pynson’s edition of Lydgate’s _Falls of Princes_, etc.); those slavishly copied, mostly, but not always, very badly, from foreign originals (_e.g._ Caxton’s _Aesop_, the editions of the _Castell of Labour_, _Art of Good Living and Good Dyeing_, the _Ship of Fools_, and most of the odd single cuts); lastly, a scanty residue of native origin, illustrating books like the _Canterbury Tales_ or _Morte d’Arthur_, for which no foreign models could be found. Some of these are almost incredibly bad, others merely wooden, a very few, like the cut to Fisher’s funeral sermon for Henry VII., fairly neat. But, again speaking generally, it is evident that English printers could enlist the services of no designers of any skill and of few woodcutters able to rival the average journeyman-work in foreign books. [34] Consult an extremely interesting paper on this subject, ‘Initial Letters in Early English Printed Books,’ by Charles Sayle. _Bibliographical Society’s Transactions_, 1904. Good initials demanded little less skill from their designers, and certainly no less from their cutters, than the larger forms of book-illustration. The great continental centres of printing prove abundantly that good initials are the natural accompaniments of good illustrations, and thus there is no room for surprise that in England, where there was no competent native school of book-illustration, there was also no competent native school of initial-cutters.