Bookbinding in England has, with very few exceptions, never attained the artistic excellence reached in France. From the earliest times to the present day servile imitations of foreign work only are seen. The one purely original English binder is Roger Payne, who from about 1770 worked for thirty or forty years in London, performing with his own hands every stage of the work, even to cutting his own tools. The result was good, solid work, with perfectly original and often very beautiful decoration, appropriate to the character of the work itself. His favourite style was drooping lines of leaf ornaments in the borders and geometrical patterns in small tools. After him came Charles Lewis, who was an artist in the true sense of the word, and, coming down to our own time, Francis Bedford, who, never pretending to originality, copied the best designs of the old French and Italian binders. His full calf books, with handsomely tooled backs, are models of solidity and taste; and his decorations on the sides of morocco-bound books are always in good taste, and often of great elegance. The binders of the present day, perhaps for lack of patronage, seem to have abandoned originality; and although much excellent work is done, it is no more than a copy of the Eves, Le Gascon, Derome, and the older artists. Parallel with the luxurious bindings with which we have been exclusively occupied, there has always been the commercial work, prepared in advance. Liturgical works, above all, are sold in this form. Books in the Grolier style or other grand personages were worked from a pattern engraved in relief, leaving nothing to the caprice of the artist, by being applied to the side by a press. This process is termed blocking. Germany made use of this process principally; also Vostre, Verard, and Tory employed the same means. Even the interlacings and the capricious arabesques of Grolier were imitated by means of a fixed plate, parts of which were finished by hand to make it appear a complete work of imagination and handicraft. [Illustration] CHAPTER IX. LIBRARIES. Art, science, and literature took refuge in convents before the invention of Printing, and libraries did not count many books. According to daily wants, the monastery scribes copied the treatises lent by neighbouring houses, and the collection was thus painfully made during many centuries. Two or three hundred works constituted ordinary collections; the powerful abbeys found in their staff the means of enriching their libraries, as we have said, but they were the privileged ones.