The effect of the richly designed borders on black dotted grounds is very pleasant, but these books seem to have been intended to be illuminated and coloured. We find in some copies that the full-page printed pictures are coloured, being worked up as miniatures, and the semi-architectural borderings with Renaissance mouldings and details are gilded flat, and treated as the frame of the picture. There is one which has the mark of the printer Gillet Hardouyn (G. H. on the shield), on the front page. In another copy (1515) this is painted and the framework gilded; the subject is Nessus the Centaur carrying off Deianira, the wife of Hercules; a sign of the tendency to revive classical mythology which had set in, in this case, in curious association with a Christian service-book. It is noticeable how soon the facility for repetition by the press was taken advantage of, and a design, especially if on ornamental borderings of a page, often repeated several times throughout a book. These borderings and ornaments being generally in separate blocks as to headings, side panels, and tail-pieces, could easily be shifted and a certain variety obtained by being differently made up. Here we may see commercialism creeping in. Considerations of profit and economy no doubt have their effect, and mechanical invention comes in to cheapen not only labour, but artistic invention also. [Illustration: ITALIAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY. P. CREMONESE'S "DANTE." (VENICE, NOVEMBER, 1491.)] [Illustration: ITALIAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY. THE DISCOVERY OF THE INDIES. (FLORENCE, 1493.)] [Illustration: ITALIAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY. FIOR DI VIRTÙ. 1498 (FLORENCE, 1493?)] [Sidenote: THE RENAISSANCE.] It took some time, however, to turn the printer into the manufacturer or tradesman pure and simple. Nothing is more striking than the high artistic character of the early printed books. The invention of printing, coming as it did when the illuminated MSS. had reached the period of its greatest glory and perfection, with the artistic traditions of fifteen centuries poured, as it were, into its lap, filling its founts with beautiful lettering, and guiding the pencil of its designers with a still unbroken sense of fitness and perfect adaptability; while as yet the influence of the revival of classic learning and mythology was only felt as the stirring and stimulating breath of new awakening spring--the aroma of spice-laden winds from unknown shores of romance--or as the mystery and wonder of discovery, standing on the brink of a half-disclosed new world, and fired with the thought of its possibilities-- "Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific."