In Sergent’s bold and vigorous Mark, the sphere, which incloses a figure of the crucified Christ, is fixed into the top of a dead trunk of a tree. It may also be mentioned that this device was frequently used by printers during the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century in this country--it appears, for example, on several books printed by R. Bentley, London, during that period. The sphere as an Elzevir Mark will be referred to in the chapter dealing with Dutch examples. [Illustration: J. STEELS. IO. STEELSIVS Concordia res paruę crescunt.] An element which may be generically termed religious plays no unimportant part in this subject. It will not be necessary to enter deeply into the motives which induced so many of the old printers and booksellers to select either their devices or the illustrations of their Marks from biblical sources; and it must suffice to say that, if the object is frequently hidden to us to-day, the fact of the extent of their employment cannot be controverted. The incident of the Brazen Serpent (Numbers xxi.) was a very popular subject. One of the earliest to use it was Conrad Neobar, Paris, 1538; it was adopted by Reginald Wolfe, who commenced printing in this country about 1543, and its possession was considered of sufficient importance to merit special mention among the goods bequeathed by his widow to her son Robert. It was also the Mark of Wolfe’s contemporaries, Martin Le Jeune, Paris, Jean Bien-Né, of the same city, and of Jean Crespin, Geneva, the last-named using it in several sizes, in which the foot of the cross is “continued” into an anchor. Apart from crosses in an infinite variety of forms, and to which reference will presently be made, by far the most popular form of religious devices consisted of what may, for convenience sake, be termed angelic. Pictorially they are nearly always failures, and often ludicrously so. The same indeed might be said of the work of most artists who have essayed the impossible in this direction. An extraordinary solemnity of countenance, a painful sameness and extreme ugliness, are the three dominant features of the angels of the Printers’ Mark. The subject offers but little scope for an artist’s ingenuity it is true, and it is only in a very few exceptions that a tolerable example presents itself. Their most frequent occurrence is in supporting a shield with the national emblem of France, and in at least one instance--that of André Bocard, Paris,--with the emblems of the city and the University of Paris. This idea, without the two latter emblems, occurs in the devices of Jehan Trepperel, Anthoine Denidel, and J. Bouyer and G. Bouchet (who adopted it conjointly), who were printing or selling books in Paris during the last decade of the fifteenth century; whilst in the provinces in that period it was employed by Jacques Le Forestier, at Rouen; and by Jehan De Gourmont, Paris, J. Besson, Lyons, and J. Bouchet at Poitiers, early in the following century.