of the printer's piety and pride, his complaints of his troubles with his workmen and rivals, his pleas for encouragement, and occasionally, penned by another hand, the record of how he was struck down by death in the midst of his work. I have never heard of any one making a representative collection of books with interesting colophons, but collecting has taken many worse forms. To lend grace to their colophons, or sometimes as a substitute for them, the early printers and publishers often used a woodcut containing their mark, sign, or device. Like the colophon itself, this was printed as a token of the master's pride in his work and his desire that it might be recognized as his, and many printers' marks are very decorative and even beautiful. Comparatively neglected until recently, within the last few years the devices used in various countries have been almost exhaustively reproduced in facsimile, thus leaving few chances of fresh discovery. The mention of devices brings us to a very interesting section of early printed books, and one which has attracted only too much attention of recent years, those decorated with the primitive cuts on wood or metal with which fifteenth century printers endeavoured to imitate the glories of illuminated manuscripts, or to increase the popularity of their books with not too critical readers. Occasionally, as in the metal cuts in the best editions of the French Horae, in the Florentine and Venetian woodcuts of the last ten years of the century, and in the best work of other countries, these early pictures possess real beauty. Often they are badly spoilt by the incompetence of the cutters, who were working without the aid of modern gravers or modern methods of preparing the wood. The early German wood-cutters, whilst their outlines are often less graceful than those of their French and Italian competitors, had a special gift for characterization, and the quality of their work is much more uniform, perhaps because even before the invention of printing with movable types they were an organized craft. But in almost all fifteenth century cuts there is a certain naive simplicity which captivates those who allow themselves to study it, until they are apt, as the present writer has confessed is probably true of himself, to rate it too highly. As is the case with the more ambitious artists in oils of the same periods, wherever there was any demand for book-illustrators a local school with strongly marked characteristics at once appears. The work of the Augsburg cutters can be told at a glance from that executed at Strassburg, and the styles predominant at Venice and Florence, at Milan and Naples are all absolutely distinct. With one or two exceptions we know nothing, until after 1500, of the men who designed or cut these illustrations, and (except in the case of those of the Low Countries) hardly any attempt has been made, or seems possible, to subdivide the