Generally it is considered that the Ovids of the fifteenth century were without pictorial illustrations, and could not, therefore, be classed among books of Emblems; but the Blandford Catalogue, p. 21, records an edition, “Venetia, 1497,” “_cum figuris depictis_,”—with figures portrayed. Without discussing the point, we will refer to an undoubted emblematized edition of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid, “Figurato & abbreviato in forma d’Epigrammi da M. Gabriello Symeoni,”—_figured and abbreviated in form of Epigrams by M. Gabriel Symeoni_. The volume is a small 4to of 245 pages, of which 187 have each a title and device and Italian stanza, the whole surrounded by a richly figured border. The volume, dedicated to the celebrated “Diana di Poitiers, Dvchessa di Valentinois,” was published “A Lione per Giouanni di Tornes nella via Resina, 1559.” An Example, p. 13, (see Plate III.,) will show the character of the work, of which another edition was issued in 1584. The Italian stanzas are all of eight lines each, and the passages of the original Latin on which they are founded are collected at the end of the volume. Thus, for “La Creatione & confusione del Mondo,” the Latin lines are, “_Ante mare & terras & quod tegit omnia, cœlum. . . . . . . . Nulli sua forma manebat. Hanc Deus, & melior litem natura diremit._” Of the devices several are very closely imitated in the woodcuts of Reusner’s Emblems, published at Frankfort, in 1581. The engravings in Symeoni’s Ovid are the work of Solomon Bernard, “the little Bernard,” a celebrated artist born at Lyons in 1512; who also produced a set of vignettes for a French translation of Virgil, _L’Eneide de Virgile, Prince des Poetes latins_, printed at Lyons in 1560. “QVINTI HORATII FLACCI EMBLEMATA,” as Otho Vænius names one of his choicest works, first published in 1607, is a similar adaptation of a classic author to the prevailing taste of the age for emblematical representation. The volume is a very fine 4to of 214 pages, of which 103 are plates; and a corresponding 103 contain extracts from Horace and other Latin authors, followed, in the edition of 1612, by stanzas in Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish. An example of the execution of the work will be found as a Photolith, Plate XVII., near the end of our volume; it is the “VOLAT IRREVOCABILE TEMPUS,”—_Irrevocable time is flying_,—so full of emblematical meaning.