For over a quarter of a century after the engraving of the plans in the Lyon _Breidenbach_ printers seem to have held aloof altogether from copperplates. In 1514 we find four engraved plans, of only slight artistic interest, printed as plates in a topographical work on _Nola_ by Ambrogius Leo, the printer being Joannes Rubeus (Giovanni Rossi) of Venice. Three years later, in 1517, a really charming print is found (set rather askew in the Museum copy) on the titlepage of a thin quarto printed at Rome, for my knowledge of which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. A. M. Hind. The book is a _Dialogus_, composed by the Right Reverend Amadeus Berrutus, Governor of the City of Rome, on the weighty and still disputable question as to whether one should go on writing to a friend who makes no reply,[65] and the plate shows the four speakers, Amadeus himself, Austeritas, Amicitia, and Amor, standing in a field or garden outside a building. The figures, especially that of Austeritas, are charmingly drawn (see Plate XXXVI); the tone of the little picture is delightful, and it is enclosed in a leafy border, which reproduces in the subtler grace of engraved work the effect of the little black and white frames which surround the Florentine woodcuts of the fifteenth century. With the _Dialogus_ of Bishop Berrutus copper engravings as book-illustrations came to an end, as far as I know, for a period of some forty years. I make this statement thus blankly in the hope that it may provoke contradiction, and at least some sporadic instances be adduced. But I have hunted through descriptions of all the books most likely to be illustrated--Bibles, Horae, editions of Petrarch's _Trionfi_ and Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_ and books of emblems, and outside England (the necessity of the exception is almost humorous) I have lighted on nothing. [Illustration: XXXVI. ROME, GABRIEL OF BOLOGNA, 1517 BERRUTUS. DIALOGUS. (TITLE)]