and his habit of preparing special copies on vellum for Charles VIII of France, Henry VII of England, the Comte d'Angouleme, and other royal and noble patrons. A woodcut in itself quite inappropriate to the text might save an illuminator some trouble by suggesting the grouping of the figures in a picture, and a cut of Saturn devouring his children was actually used in this way in one of the Henry VII books in the British Museum as a ground plan for an illumination of a Holy Family. If King Henry ever held that illumination up to the light he would have had no difficulty in seeing the scythe of Chronos and the limbs of a child protruding from Saturn's mouth, but I have never seen a paper copy of this book, and can only wonder whether the same cut was allowed to appear in it. Verard's earliest book was the translation of Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ by Laurent du Premierfait, completed 22 November, 1485, and illustrated with a single cut of the author writing in an alcove looking out on a garden where the storytellers are seen seated. An edition of _Les dits moraux des philosophes_ of Guillaume de Tignonville (Caxton's _Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers_) followed in April, 1486, and the _Livre des ruraulx prouffitz_, translated from Crescentius, with a few small cuts, not so good as those in the edition just issued by Jean Bonhomme, in the following July. His first important illustrated book was the _Cent nouvelles nouvelles_, of Christmas Eve, 1486, with two large cuts, very alike in style, of an author presenting his book to a king, and forty column-cuts, most of them used several times, occasionally with mutilations intended to erase features unsuitable to the later stories. The next important book was a _Chevalier Delibere_ of 8 August, 1488, with some excellent cuts which reappear frequently in later books. Passing over many inferior books, we come in 1492 to a really fine one, containing four separate treatises: (1) _Art de bien mourir_, illustrated with copies of the old German block-book; (2) _Traite des peines d'enfer_ (otherwise known as _L'Aiguillon de crainte divine_), with grotesque but striking cuts of the tortures of the damned; (3) _Advenement de antichrist_ and fifteen Tokens of Judgment, very poorly illustrated compared with the other parts of the book; and (4) _L'Art de bien vivre_, copiously decorated with scenes from Bible history, an oblong set, illustrating the Adoration of the Virgin and Child, the Lord's Prayer, Commandments, Apostles, etc.; (5) a very fine set of cuts illustrating the Sacraments.