As we shall see in a later chapter, there is some probability that an engraving on copper was specially prepared for the first book printed by Caxton, _The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye._ For the present, however, we must concern ourselves only with illustrations on wood, or on soft metal cut in relief after the manner of wood, a difference of more interest to the technical student than to book-lovers. The first English books thus illustrated appear in or about 1481, the year in which Jean Du Pre began the use of cuts in Paris. England was thus fairly well to the front in point of time; it is the quality which is to seek. The first of these illustrated books was probably an undated edition of the _Mirrour of the World_, a translation of a French version of a Latin _Speculum_ or _Imago mundi_. Besides some woodcut diagrams copied from drawings found in the French manuscripts, this has ten little cuts, seven of the masters of the seven liberal arts, one of the author, and two of the Creation. Two of the cuts illustrating the arts were used again almost at once in Caxton's third edition of the _Parvus et Magnus Cato_, a book of moral instruction for children in a series of Latin distichs. In 1481 also Caxton ornamented the second edition of the didactic treatise, _The Game and Play of the Chess_ (from the Latin of Jacobus de Cessolis), with sixteen woodcuts, representing the characters after which the different pieces and pawns were called. The pictures are clumsy and coarsely cut, comparing miserably with the charming little woodcuts in the Italian edition printed at Florence, but they illustrate the book, and may conceivably have increased its sales. In any case, Caxton seems, in a leisurely way, to have set about producing some more, since by or about 1484 appeared three of his most important illustrated books, the _Golden Legend_, the second edition of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, and an _Aesop_. The _Golden Legend_ is ornamented with eighteen large and thirty-two smaller woodcuts; the _Aesop_ with a full-page frontispiece and one hundred and five smaller cuts; the _Canterbury Tales_ with a large cut of the Pilgrims seated at a round table, and with some twenty smaller pictures of the different story-tellers on their horses, some of these being used more than once. For the _Aesop_, like many other foreign publishers, Caxton sent his illustrators to the designs made for the Zainers at Augsburg and Ulm, and quickly imitated all over Germany, and the copies he obtained are merely servile and so clumsy as occasionally to attain to unintended humour. Foreign influence is also evident in some at least of the cuts in the _Golden Legend_; on the other hand, we may be sure that the device of the Earl of Arundel on leaf 3 verso, a horse galloping past a tree, must have been made in England. Original, too, of necessity, were the illustrations to the _Canterbury Tales_, for which no foreign models could have been found.