The Caoursin (1496), the last book of any account printed at Ulm, has good and spirited cuts of the events described, the best of them being the flight of Turks in the mountains. One is almost tempted to think that these cuts are designed by the author of those of the Mainz Breidenbach of 1486, though the cutting is much inferior. All these books, it must be remembered, though they necessarily (being printed books) belong to the later Middle Ages, and though some of them are rather decidedly late in that epoch, are thoroughly 'Gothic' as to their ornament; there is no taint of the Renaissance in them. In this respect the art of book-ornament was lucky. The neo-classical rhetoric which invaded literature before the end of the fourteenth century (for even Chaucer did not quite escape it) was harmless against this branch of art at least for more than another hundred years; so that even Italian book-pictures are Gothic in spirit, for the most part, right up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, long after the New Birth had destroyed the building arts for Italy: while Germany, whose Gothic architecture was necessarily firmer rooted in the soil, did not so much as feel the first shiver of the coming flood till suddenly, and without warning, it was upon her, and the art of the Middle Ages fell dead in a space of about five years, and was succeeded by a singularly stupid and brutal phase of that rhetorical and academical art, which, in all matters of ornament, has held Europe captive ever since. [Illustration: From John Zainer's Griseldis, Ulm, 1473] [Illustration: From Gunther Zainer's Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, Augsburg, C. 1471] [Illustration: From Gunther Zainer's Ingold, Das Golden Spiel, Augsburg, 1472] [Illustration: From John Zainer's Boccaccio de Claris Mulieribus, Ulm, 1473] [Illustration: From Gunther Zainer's Epistles and Gospels, Augsburg, C. 1474] [Illustration: From Gunther Zainer's Spiegel D. Menschl. Lebens, Augsburg, C. 1475] [Illustration: From Gunther Zainer's Tuberinus, Geschicht von Dem Heiligen Kind Symon, Augsburg, C. 1475] [Illustration: From the Æsop] THE WOODCUTS OF GOTHIC BOOKS Notes on Woodcut Books I shall presently have the pleasure of showing you in some kind of sequence a number of illustrations taken from books of the 15th, and first years of the 16th centuries. But before I do so I wish to read to you a few remarks on the genesis and the quality of the kind of art represented by these examples, and the lessons which they teach us.