This emphatic discouragement of book-illustrations during so many years in the sixteenth century was perhaps the best thing that could have happened--next to an equally emphatic encouragement of them. There can have been no reason in the nature of things why English book-illustrations should continue over a long period of time to be third-rate. A little help and a little guidance would probably have sufficed to reform them altogether. Nevertheless it can hardly be disputed that as a matter of fact they were, with very few exceptions, third-rate, the superiority of Pynson's to Wynkyn de Worde's being somewhat less striking than is usually asserted. In the absence of the needed help and guidance it was better to make a sober dignity the ideal of book-production than to continue to deface decently printed books by the use of job lots of column cuts. The borders and other ornaments used by Berthelet, Reyner Wolfe, and Grafton, the three principal firms of this period, are at least moderately good. All three printers indulged in the pleasing heresy of pictorial or heraldic capitals, Wolfe in the _Homiliae duae_ of S. Chrysostom (1543), Grafton in Halle's Chronicle entitled _The Union of the Families of Lancaster and York_ (1548), and Berthelet in some of his later proclamations. As regards their devices, Grafton's punning emblem (a tree grafted on a tun), though in its smallest size it may pass well enough, was not worthy of the prominence which he sometimes gave it; but Wolfe's "Charitas" mark, of children throwing sticks at an apple tree, is perhaps the most pleasing of English devices, while Berthelet's "Lucrece," despite the fact that her draperies have yielded to the Renaissance temptation of fluttering in the wind rather more than a Roman lady would have thought becoming at the moment of death, is of its kind a fine piece of work. As for pictures, from which Berthelet, as far as I remember, was consistent in his abstinence--Wolfe and Grafton were wisely content to make an exception in favour of Holbein, a little medallion cut after his portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt adorning Wolfe's edition of Leland's _Naeniae_ (1542), and Grafton owing to him the magnificent titlepage to the Great Bibles in which Cranmer and Cromwell, with a host of other worthies, are seen distributing Bibles under the superintendence of Henry VIII. After the fall of Cromwell his armorial bearings were cut out of the block, a piece of petty brutality on a level with that which compelled owners of Prayer Books and Golden Legends to deface them by scratching out the word "pope" and as much as they could of the service for the day of that certainly rather questionable saint, Thomas a Becket. [Illustration: XXXII. LONDON, T. POWELL, 1556 HEYWOOD. THE SPIDER AND THE FLY. PORTRAIT OF HEYWOOD]