The various marks adopted by the printers themselves are often decorative devices of great interest and beauty. The French printers, Gillett Hardouyn and Thielman Kerver, for instance, had charming devices with which they generally occupied the front page of their Books of Hours. Others were pictorial puns and embodied the name of the printer under some figure, such as that of Petri of Basle, who adopted a device of a stone, which the flames and the hammer stroke failed to destroy; or the mark of Philip le Noir--a black shield with a negro crest and supporter; or the palm tree of Palma Isingrin. Others were purely emblematic and heraldic, such as the dolphin twined round the anchor, of Aldus, with the motto "_Propera tarde_"--"hasten slowly." This, and another device of a crab holding a butterfly by its wings, with the same signification, are both borrowed from the favourite devices of two of the early emperors of Rome--Augustus and Titus. This symbolic, emblematic, allegorizing tendency which had been more or less characteristic of both art and literature, in various degrees, from the most ancient times, became more systematically cultivated, and collections of emblems began to appear in book form in the sixteenth century. The earliest being that of Alciati, the first edition of whose book appeared in 1522, edition after edition following each other from various printers and places from that date to 1621, with ever-increasing additions, and being translated into French, German, and Italian. Mr. Henry Green, the author of "Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers" (written to prove Shakespeare's acquaintance with the emblem books, and constant allusions to emblems), said of Alciati's book that "it established, if it did not introduce, a new style for emblem literature--the classical, in the place of the simply grotesque and humorous, or of the heraldic and mystic." [Illustration: HANS BALDUNG GRÜN. "HORTULUS ANIMÆ." (STRASSBURG, MARTIN FLACH, 1511.)] [Illustration: HANS BALDUNG GRÜN. "HORTULUS ANIMÆ." (STRASSBURG, MARTIN FLACH, 1511.)] [Illustration: HANS BALDUNG GRÜN. "HORTULUS ANIMÆ." (STRASSBURG, MARTIN FLACH, 1511.)] [Illustration: HANS BALDUNG GRÜN. "HORTULUS ANIMÆ." (STRASSBURG, MARTIN FLACH, 1511.)] There is an edition of Alciati printed at Lyons (Bonhomme), 1551, a reprint of which was published by the Holbein Society in 1881. The figure designs and the square woodcut subjects are supposed to be the work of Solomon Bernard--called the little Bernard--born at Lyons in 1522. These are surrounded by elaborate and rather heavy decorative borders, in the style of the later Renaissance, by another hand, some of them bearing the monogram P.V., which has been explained to mean either Pierino del Vaga, the painter (a pupil of Raphael's), or Petro de Vingles, a printer of Lyons. [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVITH CENTURY. HANS WÄCHTLIN. (STRASSBURG, MATHIAS SCHÜRER, 1513.)] [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVITH CENTURY.