The illustrations have merit, but they are in the realistic and commonplace style of the designers of Germany and of Flanders during the fifteenth century. The want of ideality is painful. The designer certainly had no thought of irreverence, but many of the designs are really ludicrous. Some of the anachronisms are: Gideon arrayed in plate armor, with medieval helmet and visor and Turkish scimitar; David and Solomon in rakish, wide-brimmed hats bearing high conical crowns; the translation of Elijah in a four-wheeled vehicle resembling the modern farmer’s hay-wagon. Slouched hats, puffed doublets, tight-legged breeches and pointed shoes are seen in the apparel of the Israelites who are not represented as priests or soldiers. Some houses have Italian towers and some have Moorish minarets, but in none of the pictures is there an exhibition of pointed Gothic architecture. The old Dutch stair-like gable is often delineated, and so is the round arch and latticed window of the Flemish house of the fourteenth century. With all its absurdities, this edition of the _Bible of the Poor_ commanded the respectful attention of great artists like Albert Durer and Lucas von Leyden, who did not scruple to appropriate many of its designs. One of the most puzzling peculiarities of the first edition of the _Bible of the Poor_ is the dissimilarity of the copies. In some copies the dissimilarity is in the details of the frame-work; in others, it is in the foliage of trees, but it is, for the most part, confined to a few immaterial points. These differences seem to warrant the opinion stated by Sotheby that there were six distinct editions, each printed from a separate set of blocks; but this opinion cannot be reasonably defended. In all important features the copies are alike. The pages of the so-called different editions have the marks, even in little blemishes, of impressions from the same block—a uniformity which could not have been produced if each block had been re-engraved for each new edition. Why the various copies of the book should be alike in important, and unlike in minor features, cannot be explained. It has been suggested that the [p207] dissimilarities are the evidences of accident and repair; that when the block was injured, it was plugged, as is frequently done with wood-cuts in our own day, and the newly inserted plug was re-engraved with a new design. The explanation is not plausible. The differences generally appear in the same relative position on every page, and there are too many of them to be attributed to accident; they seem to have been made for some unknown purpose. Irregularities of like nature have been noticed in copies of the typographic books of the fifteenth century which are known to be of the same edition.