But if books of this kind found vogue and a large sale at this epoch, the dealers did not keep to pious publications only. By a singular mixture of the sacred and the profane, the bookmen put on sale on their stalls the "Decameron" of Boccaccio as well as the "Hours of the Immaculate Virgin," and the purchasers thought fit to make the acquaintance of the one as well as the other. Besides, the end of the fifteenth century had its literary preferences, its alluring titles, its attractive frontispieces. At the commencement of the present century double titles--"Atala; or, The Child of Mystery;" "Waverley; or, Sixty Years Since"--were common, although now out of fashion. Since then came books of travels--_Voyages au Pays des Milliards_, etc. In the fifteenth century, and even since the fourteenth, a series of titles was in public favour. There was first the _Débats_, or "Dialogues:" _Débat de la Dame et de l'Escuyer_, Paris, 1490, folio; "Dialogue of Dives and Pauper," London, Richard Pynson, 1493; and many other eccentric titles. There came also thousands of _complaintes_, a kind of lay in verse or prose; _blasons_, light pieces describing this or that thing; _doctrinals_, that had nothing to do with doctrine. And among the most approved subjects, between the piety of some and the gaiety of others, the Dances of Death established themselves firmly, showing, according to the hierarchy of classes then prevalent, Death taking the great ones of the earth, torturing equally pope, emperor, constable, or minstrel, grimacing before youth, majesty, and love. Long before printing appeared, the Dances of Death took the lead; they were some consolation for the wretched against their powerful masters, the revenge of the rabble against the king; they may be seen painted, sculptured, illuminated, when engraving was not there to multiply their use; they may be seen largely displayed on walls, sombre, frightful, at Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, Berne, Lucerne, Rouen, Amiens, and Chaise-Dieu. It was the great human equality, attempted first by the French, then by the inimitable Holbein. We can imagine the impression these bitter ironies made on the oppressed and disdained lower classes. The first "Dance of Death" was produced by Guyot Marchant in 1485, in ten leaves and seventeen engravings, in folio, with Gothic characters. Marchant describes himself as "demeurant en Champ Gaillart à Paris le vingt-huitiesme jour de septembre mil quatre cent quatre-vingtz et cinq." The book must have gone off rapidly, for it was republished in the following year, with additions and new engravings. French illustration was already moving forward, as may be judged by the reproductions here given from the folio edition of 1486. Pope and emperor, glory and power, are led and plagued by Death, hideous Death, with open body and frightful grin.