The chief Emblem deviser and writer towards the end of the century was Sebastian Brandt, born at Strasburg in 1458, and after a life of great usefulness and honour dying at Bâle in 1520. The publication in German Iambic verse of his “~Narren Schyff~,” Bâle, Nuremberg, Rüttlingen, and Augsburg, A.D. 1494, forms quite an epoch in Emblem-book literature. Previous to A.D. 1500, _Locher_, crowned poet laureate by the Emperor Maximilian I., translated the German into Latin verse, with the title “~Stultifera Nauis~” (see Plate IX.); _Riviere_ of Poitiers, the Latin into French verse, “~La Nef des Folz du Monde~;” and _Droyn_ of Amiens, into French prose, “~La grãt Nef des Folz du Monde~.” Early in the next century, 1504, or even in 1500, there was a Flemish version; and in 1509 two English versions,—_one_ translated out of French, “THE SHYPPE OF FOOLES,” by Henry Watson, and printed by “Wynkyn de Worde, MCCCCCIX.” (see Dibdin’s _Tour_, ii. p. 103); _the other_,—“STULTIFERA NAUIS,” or “~The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde~;” “Inprentyd in the Cyte of London, by Richard Pynson, M.D.IX.” (Dibdin’s _Typ. Ant._ ii. p. 431.) This latter was “_translated out of Latin, French, and Duch into Englishe_, by Alexander Barclay, _Priest_;” and reprinted in 1570, during Shakespeare’s childhood by the “Printer to the Queenes Maiestie.” At the same time, 1570, another work by Barclay was published, which, although without devices, partakes of an allegorical or even of an emblematical character; it is _The Mirrour of good Maners_; “conteining the foure Cardinal Vertues.” Dibdin, in his _Bibliographical Antiquarian_, iii. p. 101, mentions “a pretty little volume—‘as fresh as a daisy,’ the _Hortulus Rosarum de Valle Lachrymarum_, ‘A little Garden of Roses from the Valley of Tears’ (to which a Latin ode by S. Brandt is prefixed), printed by J. de Olpe in 1499,”—but he gives no intimation of its character; conjecturing from its title and from the woodcuts with which it is adorned, it will probably on further inquiry be found to bear an emblematical meaning. Dibdin also, in the same work, iii. p. 294, names “a German version of the ‘HORTULUS ANIMÆ’ of S. Brant,” in manuscript; “undoubtedly,” he says, “among the loveliest books in the Imperial Library.” The Latin edition was printed at Strasburg in 1498, and is ornamented with figures on wood; many of these are mere pictures, without any symbolical meaning,—but it often is the case that the illuminated manuscripts, especially if devotional, and the early printed books of every kind that have pictorial illustrations in them, present various examples of symbolical and emblematical devices.