At the commencement of the century Basle had a school of _Formschneiders_ working for export. Besides the numerous products used at Lyons, it had also a trade in wood blocks, which, having been used, were afterwards sold. Among these exchanges of engravings were many plates of Brandt's "Ship of Fools," sold in 1520 to Galliot du Pré, publisher, of Paris, who used them in the _Eloge de la Folie_ of Erasmus. The reign of Francis I. saw a great advance in the national art of illustration. The arrival at the court of Italian artists of the decadence, such as Rosso and Primaticcio, produced a revolution in taste. The exaggerated slightness of the figures brought by these artists from beyond the Alps was considered as of supreme distinction; in their twisted draperies and mannered poses was seen a precious beauty that tempted the ready intelligence of the court of France. The simple and ingenuous figures of the old French artists were ranked among the refuse of another age, and their compositions were regarded with contempt, and deemed antique. The rage for emblems and for allegories and mythological figures generally was well suited to these eccentric and bizarre inventions. From another side, an entire class of artists or artisans, book illustrators first, then enamellers and jewellers, made use of these Italian models, with which the King encumbered his galleries, and which, at great expense, covered the walls of Fontainebleau. One can understand what these skilful men made of such a movement and of so thoughtless an infatuation. The publishers saw the demand, and composed works of which the sale was assured by the subjects that they furnished to other designers. This explains the quantity of Alciati's "Emblems" and Ovid's "Metamorphoses" published at Lyons and Paris, and copied and recopied a hundred times by the art industries of the time. Without it the enormous success of mediocre productions, as the "Emblems," for example, in which the meaning of the enigma or rebus cannot always be seized, is ill understood. It was Alciati who made this literature the fashion. He was a sort of Epicurean and miserly jurisconsult, who had as many lords and masters on earth, as the kings and princes who liked to bid against each other to engage him. He had quitted Italy, seduced by the offers of Francis I., but when Sforza paid him a larger sum, he returned, giving as reason for his vacillation that the sun had to travel the earth and warm it by its rays; this was an emblematic answer, for his emblems had all the coarse, sceptical humour which not a few had then already discovered. At most these philosophical aphorisms, if we take them seriously, have their droll side in that their author often practised the reverse of his teaching. A miser, he abuses the avaricious; flying his country for the love of gain, he blames those to whom "a better condition is offered by strangers." Yet he is sometimes logical and