Book printing and picture printing have both the same inner cause for their origin, namely, the impulse to make each mental gain a common blessing. Not merely princes and rich nobles were to have the privilege of adorning their private chapels and apartments with beautiful religious pictures; the poorest man was also to have his delight in that which the artist had devised and produced. It was not sufficient for him when it stood in the church as an altar shrine, visible to him and to the congregation from afar. He desired to have it as his own, to carry it about with him, to bring it into his own home. The grand importance of wood engraving and copper-plate is not sufficiently estimated in historical investigations. They were not alone of use in the advance of art; they form an epoch in the entire life of mind and culture. The idea embodied and multiplied in pictures became like that embodied in the printed word, the herald of every intellectual movement, and conquered the world. _Woltmann._ * * * * * [Illustration: The Print of St. Christopher. Size of original, 8-1/8 by 11-1/4 inches.] One of the purposes to which early printing was applied was the manufacture of engraved and colored pictures of sacred personages. These pictures, or image prints, as they are called by bibliographers, were made of many sizes; some of them are but little larger than the palm of the hand, others are of the size of a half sheet of foolscap. In a few prints there are peculiarities of texture which have provoked the thought that they may have been printed from plates of [p070] soft metal like lead or pewter; but this conjecture has never been verified. We find in many of the prints the clearest indications that they were taken from engravings on wood. With a few exceptions, these prints were colored; some were painted, but more were colored by means of stenciling, as is abundantly proved by the mechanical irregularities which are always produced by the occasional slipping of the stencil. The colors are gross, glaring, and so inartistically applied that the true outlines of the figures are frequently obscured. The quality of the engraving is unequal; some prints are neatly, and others are rudely cut, but in nearly all of them the engraving is in simple outline. We seldom see any shading tints, or any cross-hatchings, rarely ever any attempt to produce a perspective by the use of fine or faint lines. The absence of shading lines is not entirely due to the imperfect skill of the engravers. The engravings seem to have been cut for no other purpose than that of showing the colors of the stencil painter to advantage, by giving a definite edge to masses of color. The taste for prints in black and white had not then been developed. To the print-buyer of the fifteenth century, the attraction of the image print was not in its drawing, but in its vivid color, and its supposed