where Herrick's not very lucid English is explained by 'De Moribus German.' 43—'Primi in omnibus praeliis oculi vincuntur.' Or again, we may take 'Revenge'—a rather longer verse than those we have hitherto quoted:—

where Herrick's original is Tacitus, 'Hist.' IV., 3:—'Tanto proclivius est iniuriae quam beneficio vicem exsolvere; quia gratia oneri, ultio in quaestu habetur.'

Herrick's obligations to Sallust are less important than those to Seneca and Tacitus. In one case he mentions the historian by name:—

The reference being to the spurious 'Epist. ad Cai. Caesar. de Rep. Ordinanda.' 'Consultation'—

is apparently suggested by the 'Nam et prius quam incipias consulto, et ubi consulueris mature facto opus est,' of the opening of the 'Catiline.' There are some three or four other reminiscences about equally close, but they are hardly worth special mention.

As might be expected, many of Herrick's borrowings, especially those from Tacitus, have to do with politics, and commentators who have mistaken his jottings from his common-place book for the expression of his own principles have been rather confused by their alternate leaning to absolutism and its reverse. Thus, in 'A King and no King'—

the sentiment is remarkably 'thorough'; but the italics indicate a quotation, and we can hardly be wrong in tracing the lines to the 'Thyestes' of Seneca:—

Again, in 'Shame no Statist'—

both lines, though only the last is italicised, are from Seneca; the first from 'Hippolytus' 431—'Malus est minister regii imperii pudor'; the second from 'Œdipus' 701—'Odia qui nimium timet regnare nescit.' On the other hand, the italics in the lines entitled 'Patience in Princes' and 'Gentleness' show that some of Herrick's constitutional maxims were also quotations, though their source has not yet been traced. That of the first is, perhaps, to be found in Seneca's 'De Clementia' i. 22. 'Kings ought to shear, not skin, their sheep' comes from Suetonius, 'Tiberius' 32 ('Boni pastoris est tondere pecus, non deglubere'), and 'Kings ought to be more loved than feared' from Seneca's 'Octavia,' l. 457 ('Decet timeri Cæsarem. At plus diligi'). Even in weightier matters than politics we must be on our guard against the tricks Herrick may play us. The lines entitled 'Devotion makes the Deity'—

have recently been quoted as expressing 'for once a really high and deep thought in words of really noble and severe propriety'; yet they are taken almost literally from Martial VIII. xxiv. 5:—

In his 'Noble Numbers' Herrick quotes or paraphrases in the same way from S. Augustine, Cassiodorus, S. Bernard, S. Basil, S. Ambrose, John of Damascus, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. One or two passages have also been traced with absolute certainty to a contemporary theological work, and it fills us with admiration to watch how dexterously Herrick, with a minimum of alteration, turns the prose of the commentator into excellent verse.

If we turn to Herrick's debt to more poetical writers we find that he takes a few phrases from Catullus (his obligations to whom have been absurdly exaggerated), about as much from Tibullus, and a little also from Propertius and Juvenal. To his poem entitled 'The Vision' he transfers from Virgil ('Aeneid' i. 315-20) the charming description of the dress of the Spartan huntress, in which Venus encounters Aeneas. From Horace, whom he occasionally imitates, he borrows many single lines, for the most part acknowledging them by italics. To Ovid his indebtedness for phrases and turns of thought is still more marked. On the whole, however, his chief obligation is to Martial, who supplied him not only with many of his epigrams, both good and bad, but also with suggestions for more important poems. Thus, in his second poem ('To his Muse') he is inspired by Martial I. iv.; a phrase in his third ('To his Book') is suggested by the same original; the reference to Brutus in the fourth is from Martial XI. xvi.; and the next poem is a paraphrase from X. xix. All these poems have to do with his book, and it is needless to say that the amount of borrowing in them is very exceptional; but it was from Martial VII. lxxxix. that Herrick took his lovely 'Go, Happy Rose'; one of his poems on Julia is from Martial IV. xxii.; 'The Lily and the Crystal' is suggested by the same poet (VIII. lxviii. 5-8), and there are numerous smaller borrowings, altogether apart from the epigrams.

Of Greek, it is probable that Herrick's knowledge was only slight. There is even some slight reason to believe that his acquaintance with Greek authors was mainly derived from Latin translations. 'The Cruel Maid' is a very close imitation of part of the twenty-third Idyll of Theocritus; the only other Greek poetry which plays a serious part in his verse is the pseudo-Anacreon. To the collection of sportive poems, whose very slightness is their charm, which passed under Anacreon's name, Herrick's obligations are really immense. It is not only that several of his most charming poems—'The Cheat of Cupid,' 'The Wounded Cupid,' 'On Himself,' 'Upon His Grey Hairs,' etc.—are directly translated or closely imitated from the Greek; but we feel in the case of these lyrics that they really helped the development of Herrick's own gifts in a way in which none of his Latin storehouses even approached. Thus it would be easy to make out a fairly long list of poems, in which he comes so close to the spirit of 'Anacreon' that the curious student of such matters is sent hunting through the pages of his Bergk in a vain search for originals which never existed.

Herrick went late to the University, and, despite the extreme propriety of the language as to his reading which we find in his letters to his goldsmith-uncle when he was in need of a remittance, it is difficult to believe that he was ever a very earnest or laborious student. Thus the list of authors from whom he borrowed comes rather as a surprise. It is probable that a little discount must be taken off the amount of erudition with which it might incline us to credit him. His poems make it absolutely certain that he was steeped in the works of Ben Jonson and well acquainted with Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' and the Essays of Montaigne. Now Jonson, Burton, and Montaigne, as it is hardly necessary to remark, all three drew inspiration from the classics, and it would not be difficult to prove that at times Herrick's quotations came to him filtered through these authors, and not directly from the fountain head. This helps us to understand some excursions of the poet which seem unusually far afield. For instance, there can be no doubt that the ultimate original of Herrick's—

is from Ausonius (361, ll. 49-50):—

But how came Herrick to be reading an author so little known? The probable answer is that he found the lines in Burton (III. ii. s. sec. 5), where they are quoted with the gloss:—

'A virgin is like a flower, a rose withered on a sudden. Let them take time then while they may, make advantage of youth,' etc.

So too when we find Herrick in his 'Jove for our labours all things sells us,' quoting Epicharmus, economy bids us imagine that he found the saying (τôν πονôν πôλοuσιν ηêμιν παντα ταγατη' ηοι Τηεοι) not in Xenophon's 'Memorabilia' ii. i. 20), where it first appears, but in Montaigne (II. 20), where it is quoted. For we know Herrick read Montaigne, and we have no evidence that he read Xenophon. Where the quotation is from Horace, or Martial, or Seneca, or any other author whom we may be reasonably sure that Herrick studied at first hand, it is of course quite as likely that he found it for himself as that his attention was drawn to it by Jonson, Burton, or Montaigne. Probably the poet himself would sometimes have been puzzled to trace his obligations to their sources. In any case, when all necessary allowance has been made, it is obvious that his knowledge of the chief Latin writers was considerable, and that according to the stereotyped phrase, he must have 'kept up his classics' very diligently after leaving Cambridge.

What effect should this tracking out the poet's quotations and adaptations to their sources have on our judgment of his genius? Surely, it should make us rate it more highly. We may almost say that what Herrick borrowed was intrinsically of little more value than the tags from a Latin delectus. He breathed upon them and filled them with his music, so that they assimilate so admirably with his verse, that even when he printed them in italics the meaning of the change of type has long remained a secret to his commentators. It has become a commonplace of criticism to write of Herrick as a 'butterfly,' but he was really a conscious artist, and no mean one. The examples which have been given in this paper have necessarily been chosen chiefly to illustrate the width of his reading. If space allowed, it would be pleasant to adduce others with the special object of exhibiting the skilfulness of his transmutations. Even in those we have given, few genuine lovers of poetry will deny that while to translate 'luserunt navigia' by 'where late they danced' is merely a happy stroke of scholarship, the rendering of 'in lubrico' by 'on icy pavements,' or 'regnare nescit' by 'he rents his crown,' is sheer genius.

PRINTERS' MARKS OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES[25]

IF truth is to be told, I have never as yet met with any amateur who collected books for the sake of the printer's mark at the beginning or end of them. But it has always seemed to me that it would be an agreeable variety of book-collecting to do this, and one which would lead the collector along many by-paths of curious knowledge. For fear of any possible mistake, I should perhaps emphasise the point that the collection must be one not of printers' marks cut out from books, but of books in which the marks are printed. Even in the case of book-plates, it has often been noted how much they gain in interest when they are found in situ, though there is always the haunting fear that the conjunction of book and plate may only be due to the ingenuity of the vendor. Book-plates, however, have of right a separate existence apart from books, since they are made separately and must await their owners' pleasure before they can be set to their proper work. But the printer's device is an integral part of the book in which it occurs, nor can any limpet torn from its rock look more unhappy than one of these marks cut out from the page on which it was printed, and pasted in a scrap-book. Unhappily, it must be said that, like the book-plate, though more rarely, a device is sometimes found attached to a book to which it does not belong. Thus, in the last Inglis sale an edition of a 'Defensorium Curatorum' by an unknown French printer, was catalogued as from the press of Colard Mansion on the score of Mansion's device, cut out with extraordinary neatness, being pasted on the last leaf. The buyer of it certainly bid with open eyes, but it is annoying to pay even a few shillings more because of such a freak. So, too, a leaf with Caxton's device bound at the end of Pynson's edition of the 'Speculum Vitae Christi' led the late Mr. Blades to believe that Pynson was Caxton's apprentice. But these misdeeds or mishaps are exceptional, and it is the collector of scraps, from Bagford downwards, whom the printers' device has chiefly to fear.

The merits of printers' devices are twofold—many of them are very pretty, and all of them, when duly studied, are capable of throwing considerable light on the history of printing, more especially on the often important point of the order in which books were issued and the year, or even the month, to which an undated book belongs. The prettiness or beauty of some of the designs will be shown by our illustrations, nor is it difficult to explain how the devices throw light on the careers of their printers.

Always executed in the manner of wood-cuts, that is to say, in relief, some of them were cut with a knife in wood, others with a graver on very soft metal. The lines of the wood block break with use, the lines of the metal block bend, and by careful examination of any two prints a good guess can mostly be made as to which was the earlier. A palmary instance of this is a metal block which Richard Pynson began to use in 1496. Its lower border began to bend almost at once; by 1503 the bend was as much as an eighth of an inch, and year by year it increased, till in 1513 the border broke altogether. Needless to say, that every undated book in which this border appears can be dated almost as easily as if the year of publication were printed in it. When several examples by the same printer are brought together, a little observation, if carefully verified, will give a good clue to the date at which a device first came into use and when it was abandoned for another, and herein lie both the usefulness and the sport which may be obtained from the study of printers' devices. What the collector should aim at is to obtain the earliest book in which the mark is used, and to make notes of its subsequent history.

Perhaps from the fact that the Anchor and Dolphin which Aldus adopted as his device were counterfeited with evil intent, it has sometimes been said that the devices were used as trade marks to protect the copyright of the books in which they occur. Copyright as such did not exist in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and books could only be protected by their printer obtaining a special 'privilege' either for an individual book or for books of a particular kind. With this the devices had nothing to do, and although a pleasing design often begat a whole progeny of similar ones, this copying, when it was not merely lazy, was probably complimentary rather than competitive. We must take it that the devices were purely ornamental, aiming, no doubt, at the glorification of the printers who used them, but not possessing any commercial significance. Hence, perhaps, the variety we find in them. They may be simply personal, containing only the printer's private arms or in some few cases his portrait. They may join his initials or some motto of his choice to the arms of the city in which he worked, or to some more or less graceful scroll work. They may reproduce the sign of his shop or the figure of his patron saint; or lastly, a kind much in vogue in the sixteenth century, they may be allegorical. As we should expect, there is a fairly steady movement from simplicity to ornateness. The earliest device (the first of our illustrations), that used by Fust and Schöffer at the end of the Latin Bible they printed at Mainz in 1462, consists only of two shields slung from a branch. That of Arnold ther Hoernen, of Cologne (about 1470), is in the same style, but even more modest. A few years later, Günther Zainer, of Augsburg, showed greater ambition in his mark, which represents a wild man holding a shield, on which is a crowned lion rampant. But though Schöffer, ther Hoernen, and Zainer thus led the way, their example was very little followed in Germany during the fifteenth century, and it is in other countries and in the books of native printers rather than of the German teachers of the craft that the development of the ornamental device must be looked for.

In Italy, despite what has just been said, the earliest device known is that of a German printer, Sixtus Riessinger, who worked at Naples, 1471-80. It represents a woman holding a shield, while behind her is a scroll bearing the letters 'S.R.D.A., Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina,' i.e. of Cologne. This device stands by itself, the real sequence of Italian designs beginning with that used at Venice by Nicolas Jenson and John of Cologne in 1481. This consists of a circle and of a straight line, crossed by two bars, rising at right angles to the base of a segment of it. It was imitated by one Italian printer after another at Venice, Pavia, Brescia, and elsewhere, and with various ornamental modifications re-appears in quite three out of four of the fifteenth century Italian devices. From Italy it passed to France, and from France to England, where it was used by Julian Notary. The design, by dividing the circle into three parts, allows the printer to place his initials in them, and this was frequently done. Jenson was also a very famous printer, and his example would naturally be imitated. But how it came to be imitated so widely, and whether any meaning, symbolical or otherwise, can be extracted from the design, are problems to which no satisfactory answer has been returned. Among the prettier modifications of this too popular design are those used by Franciscus de Mazaliis, of Reggio, and by Egmont and Barrevelt, the printers of the Venice edition of the Sarum Missal. The latter is shown on page 229.

Among designs of other patterns, mention may be made of the crown used by Mazochius, of Ferrara; the 'putti' of Filippo Giunta, and the crowned dolphin of Piero Pacini, both of Florence; the fourteen varieties of angels which appear on as many devices used by the brothers De Legnano, of Milan; the shielded warrior of Bernardinus de Garaldis, of Milan; the S. Jerome of Bernardinus Benalius; the fleur-de-lys of Lucantonio Giunta; the S. Antony of Philippus Pintius; the S. George and the Dragon of Giorgio Rusconi; and the mouse-eating cat of J. B. Sessa, reproduced on page 231. The last five printers all worked at Venice, and almost all of those we have named belonged not only to the fifteenth century, but to the sixteenth, in which the vogue of the Jenson model at last came to an end.

It has already been said that for variety and artistic treatment among printers' devices, the first place must be given to those found in French books. Yet their beginning was poor enough, the representation of the ship, taken from the arms of the city of Paris, which was used by Louis Martineau about 1484, being badly cut and quite insignificant. Jean Du Pré (for his first device), Pierre Levet, Jean Lambert, and one or two other French printers at Paris, used some of the features of the normal Italian design, though in a far more elaborate and decorative form; while at Lyons, where Italian influence was always strong, simple copying was thought good enough.

But the typical French device is much more pictorial than any of these. The arms of France and of the city of Paris are prominent in many of them, and in that of André Bocard both are used at once; but the printer used often to take a suggestion from his Christian name, from the sign by which his shop was known, or from the motto with which most early French devices are encircled. The second device of Antoine Caillaut (reproduced on p. 241) is a beautiful and early example of the appearance of a patron saint in a device; while that of the two swans used by Du Pré, whose printing house had the 'Deux Cygnes' for its sign, is a good example of the second class. The device here chosen for our second French illustration I take to be an example of the pictorial expansion of a motto, Regnault's expression of trust in God being well represented by this quiet little pastoral scene (see page 234).

Though far inferior to the best French examples, the printers' marks used in the Low Countries are also numerous, varied and good. They range from the twin shields of Veldener and Gerard Leeu to such imposing devices as the elephant and howdah used, with punning intent, by an unknown printer ('G.D.') at Gouda, and the bannered castle, the arms of the city of Antwerp, adopted by Thierry Martens. Among the earliest are the small portraits of the printers themselves found in some of the books of John and Conrad, of Paderborn, in Westphalia. That of the former, here reproduced, is sometimes found in red ink as well as black, and is referred to in one of his colophons as 'meum solitum signum.' The bird-cage used by Godfrid Back at Antwerp has no parallel among devices that I know of, but as a specimen of the larger Dutch marks we will take that of his fellow-citizen, Matthias van der Goes, which represents a very vigorous 'wild man' with club and shield (see page 228).

Spanish devices are in some cases adapted from the French or Italian, in others rather dull and uninteresting. Of those which belong to neither of these classes, by far the finest as a piece of decorative work is that of Diego de Gumiel, of Valladolid (see page 236), the effect of which is as rich as that of the best of William Morris's initial letters.

Next in interest to this we may perhaps rank the rather elaborate device (see page 230) of Arnold Guillem de Brocar, the printer of the Complutensian Polyglot, who at different times in his career had presses also at four other places. The motto upon it, 'Inimici hominis domestici ejus,' though it has been made the basis of some theories as to Brocar's career, is still unexplained. If the 'domestici,' the 'those of his own household,' could be extended to Brocar's workpeople, we should have here a fine example of an early grumble by a master printer, but the suggestion is perhaps more pleasing than probable. Cryptic mottoes seem to have run in Brocar's family. His son Juan adopted an extraordinary device of a knight seizing a lady by the hair, with an inscription 'Legitime certanti,' which must be taken as sarcastic.

The history of printers' marks in England begins with that used by Caxton for the first time as late in his career as 1487. Out of respect for his master, Wynkyn de Worde adopted the essential parts of this, i.e. the initials 'W.C.' and the interlacement between them in all his fifteen different devices, thus conferring on them a rather painful monotony. English printers, indeed, seem to have set little store on originality in these matters, the earliest device of Pynson being adapted from that of Le Talleur, of Rouen, that of Richard Faques from Thielmann Kerver's, the 'wild men' of Peter Treveris from those of Pigouchet, and John Byddell's unprepossessing figure of Virtue from that used by Jacques Sacon, of Lyons. Nevertheless, English devices at once interesting and original are not lacking. That used by Pynson at the end of Lord Berner's translation of 'Froissart' (see page 232) is one of the largest and not the least fine of armorial marks, the interlaced triangles of William Faques make a singularly neat device, and John Day's picture of two men gazing on a skeleton, with the motto, 'Etsi mors indies accelerat vivet tamen post funera virtus,' has its own merits. England also contributes two of the very small number of portrait marks, a large one of Day and a smaller one (here reproduced) of John Wight,[26] a bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard, who published a few books between 1551 and 1589. It seemed permissible to come down as late as this in the case of our own country, but to speak of the French and German devices of the middle of the sixteenth century would open up too large a field. All that has been attempted here is to give a few characteristic examples of comparatively early date, so as to exhibit the different styles of printers' marks, used in different countries by one generation of printers. I hope that any of my readers who had not hitherto made the acquaintance of these little designs will have been convinced that they are worthy of further study.

Any one who desires to take up the subject more or less seriously will find a considerable literature ready to his hand. To Messrs. Bell and Co.'s 'Ex Libris' series Mr. William Roberts has contributed a pleasant volume, which offers an easy introduction for beginners. More serious students will find an almost exhaustive series of woodcut copies of French devices in Silvestre's 'Marques typographiques,' and much prettier facsimiles abound in M. Claudin's great 'Histoire de l'Imprimerie en France,' though this as yet treats only of Paris printers of the fifteenth century. For Italy, Dr. Kristeller's 'Die Italienischen Buchdrucker und Verlegerzeichen bis 1525' is excellent, and its publishers (Heitz and Mündel) have brought out similar monographs on the marks used at Strasburg, Basel, Frankfort, and Cologne, and also in Spain and Portugal. The earlier Low Country marks will be found in Holtrop's 'Monumens typographiques des Pays-Bas'; the earlier English ones in the 'Handlists of English Printers' issued by the Bibliographical Society.

As to collecting, it is certainly a little alarming to have to buy a whole book for the sake of a single device in it, or at most two. On the other hand, the books are pleasant things in themselves, and there is an alleviation in the fact that the devices only begin to abound a little before 1490, and that books of this date can be acquired, even now, at prices which seem reasonable compared with those fetched by the real first-fruits of the press. Many very pretty devices will be found in the thin volumes of Latin verse published at Paris in the early parts of the sixteenth century, and a bookman who meets a 'tract-volume' containing several of these bound together, will probably find sufficient devices among them to start his collection.

THE FRANKS COLLECTION OF ARMORIAL BOOK-STAMPS[27]

SOME little time after the death of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks the Library of the British Museum acquired, through the kindness of his successor in the Keepership of Mediæval Antiquities, Mr. C. H. Read, some three hundred books, of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, bearing on their bindings armorial book-stamps. For lack of a better word these three hundred books have been dignified in the heading of this article by the title of a 'collection,' but it is due to the great reputation of Sir Wollaston Franks as a collector to say that he himself would probably have smiled if he had heard them called so. As all bookish people know, one of his real hobbies was the collection of book-plates, his countless specimens of which passed at his death to another department of the British Museum, that of Prints and Drawings, where considerable progress has been made in describing and cataloguing them. By the side of his thousands of book-plates these three hundred or so old books with armorial stamps on their covers are a merely subsidiary collection, sufficient to illustrate the method of marking ownership, which book-plates first rivalled and then, alas, almost entirely superseded.

The £500 which Sir Wollaston Franks gave for the copy of the 'Ptolemy' of 1490, with the badge of Mary Queen of Scots, recently the subject of one of the Bibliographical Society's Monographs, shows the spirit in which he would have pursued the collection of armorial bindings had he taken it up seriously. As it was, he seems to have given a standing order to several booksellers to send him any books or odd volumes, of which the chief value lay in the stamped arms, and which they were willing to sell for a small sum, and to have taken his chance. There are worse ways of collecting than this, for a bookseller who knows that he can always place a book of a certain class with a customer, will often be content to buy it at a venture for a small price and pass it on at once at a few shillings' profit without examining it very carefully or inquiring too curiously into its market value. As will be seen from some of the books soon to be mentioned, this was certainly the experience in this instance of Sir Wollaston Franks, and the foregoing depreciation of the specimens he thus got together must be understood as written solely to prevent his name in the title of this article from raising expectation too high.

Before describing any individual specimens, it may be worth while to say a few words about book-stamps in general. Compared with book-plates, of which the literature during the last ten or twelve years has grown with such rapidity, they have as yet received very little attention outside France, where Guigard's 'Armorial du Bibliophile' in its second edition (1892) gives as full information about most French examples as can reasonably be desired. In the third volume of 'Bibliographica,' Mr. W. Y. Fletcher wrote an interesting article on 'English Armorial Book-stamps,' and it is much to be wished that he could be persuaded to print in full his notes on the subject, which are certainly more complete— or less incomplete—than those in the possession of any one else. A few years ago the Grolier Club of New York held an exhibition of books bearing these marks of ownership, and printed a small catalogue of it, which I have not had the advantage of seeing. Other information, as far as I am aware, can only be obtained by painful search in books of heraldry and genealogy and in biographies.

Towards the close of the age of manuscripts, it became a fairly common practice, more especially in Italy, for book-lovers to cause their arms to be painted as part of the decoration of the first page of text. In the last years of the fifteenth century book-plates came into use in Germany, and during the next hundred years were slowly adopted both in France and England. But until the sixteenth century was far advanced the commonest way of marking possession of a book in England remained that of inscribing the owner's name on the title-page or a fly-leaf. Thus all the books in the large libraries of Archbishop Cranmer and Lord Lumley bear their names, 'Thomas Cantuariensis' and 'Lumley,' in the handwriting of their secretaries or librarians. One or two instances are found of names printed or written on book-edges. That of 'Anna Regina Anglie,' i.e. Anne Boleyn, on a vellum presentation copy of Tyndale's New Testament of 1534, is a well-known example of this. On the outside of books names are found from a very early period; but in the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth they are mostly those, not of the owners of the volume, but of the bookbinder, as in the case of Conrad of Strasburg, Johann Richenbach, and André Boule. Every one, however, knows the inscriptions which the three great collectors, Grolier, Maioli, and Lauwrin put on their books. As the sixteenth century grew older the names or initials of the owner, with sometimes a date added, are found on a fair number of bindings. In Germany such names and dates were frequently branded in black on pigskin bindings. In other countries the names are, as a rule, stamped in gold. As late as the eighteenth century Lord Oxford used to stamp his name, 'Robert Harley,' on his books, in addition to his arms.

Coming at last to armorial book-stamps, we find that from the fifteenth century onwards books were often impressed with the royal arms. These were used both as marks of possession and also, at least in England (as noted by Mr. Davenport in his article on 'Some Popular Errors as to old Bindings' in vol. ii. of 'The Library'), as decorative designs on the trade bindings of loyal stationers. Crowned initials and royal badges are often found, and these nearly always mark royal ownership. When this use of armorial book-stamps was first adopted by collectors beneath the royal rank is not easy to say. Grolier is said to have occasionally placed his arms on his books, but I believe that until about 1560, the practice did not become at all common even in foreign countries, and in England it was probably some ten years later. It is, perhaps, worth noting that in France the fashion must undoubtedly have received a great impetus from the sumptuary law of 1577, which restricted the use of the elaborate 'fanfare' style of ornamenting books to those in royal ownership. The splendid bindings of a few of the books of Jacques Auguste de Thou (associated, rightly or wrongly, with the name of Nicolas Eve) must all have been executed before this date. Thereafter he adopted the plain morocco covers decorated only with the stamps of his arms with which all book-lovers are familiar. Other collectors followed his example, and in their respective kinds both the strong, massively stamped books of De Thou, and the more finely grained red moroccos of later French bookmen, in which the tiny stamp of arms has a Legasconesque delicacy of finish, offer examples of simple decoration which the wealthiest collector may well imitate.

Of books bearing the arms of French collectors upwards of one hundred and fifty were brought together by Sir Wollaston Franks, but the English stamps, which number rather over a hundred, must engage our first attention. One of the earliest of these is a small stamp of the arms of Archbishop Parker, forming the centre of a rather decorative binding, obviously of English work. The book it is found on is a copy of Beza's Latin New Testament, printed at London by Vautrollier, in 1574, on the yellow paper occasionally used during the middle of the sixteenth century, presumably as less trying to the eyes than the ordinary white. Parker's patronage of John Day is well known, but in view of the likelihood of this being a presentation copy to the Archbishop from Vautrollier, it would be rash to credit Day with the binding of this volume, which is, moreover, not quite so original as Day's work at its best.

Two other books in the Franks collection are connected by their stamps with Parker's royal mistress. One of these bears the well-known Falcon badge which Elizabeth adopted in imitation of her mother. This is found on a copy of Etienne Dolet's 'De Latina lingua' printed at Basel in 1539. I do not know if the point has been raised and settled as to whether this badge was used by Elizabeth, both as queen and as princess, but there is at least nothing to prevent our supposing that this treatise of Dolet's was one of Elizabeth's school-books, and thus often in her hands. It is at least a point in favour of such a supposition that the badge in this case is sharper and fresher than on any other book I have ever seen. The other Elizabethan book in the collection is even more interesting, for its covers are embossed with the portrait-stamp of the queen here reproduced, and no other instance of the use of the stamp is recorded. The book is the Plantin Greek Testament of 1583, an edition which the queen would be very likely to possess. But whether this copy was ever in her library we have no means of deciding, the alternatives of presentation to and presentation by, of ownership by the original of the portrait or by some loyal subject, being very equally balanced. The stamp in this case is slightly raised, and is the earliest instance of a cameo stamp on any English binding.

The only other sixteenth-century English armorial stamps in the collection are two examples of the stamp used by William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, one in gold on a copy of the Greek Testament of Erasmus printed at Basel in 1570, the other in silver on a Hebrew Bible issued from the press of Plantin in 1583. It is certainly a very decorative stamp, but I must confess to preferring to it the simple inscription 'William' and 'Mildred Cicyll' on a binding which entered the Museum with the old Royal Library. In the present collection a little Lyons Virgil printed by Gryphius in 1571, though with a decorative instead of an heraldic stamp, bears the initials, 'W.P.,' of an English owner, a book-plate of 'The Right Honble. Robert James L^d Petre, Thorndon in Essex,' combined with a manuscript note, dated 1589, enabling us to identify W. P. with William Petre the second Baron (1575-1607). The note, apparently written when Petre was fourteen years old, records that the book was acquired by exchange with a certain Dominus Bigge.

We come now to an interesting group of books, once in the possession of Ralph Sheldon, the seventeenth-century antiquary. The first of these bears not his own arms but those of Augustine Vincent, the Windsor Herald, which two years ago attracted attention from being found, stamped in blind, on the splendid copy of the first Folio Shakespeare presented to him by William Jaggard, one of its publishers.28 In the present instance they are impressed in gold on Estienne de Cypres' 'Genealogies de soixante et sept tres nobles Maisons,' printed at Paris in 1586. Augustine Vincent died in 1626, and his son sold his books to Ralph Sheldon, who on his death in 1684 bequeathed his manuscripts to the College of Arms. The printed books apparently remained for some time in the possession of the family, for this volume bears a Sheldon book-plate, and Sir Wollaston Franks was able to purchase two other books with Ralph Sheldon's book-stamp, Campian's 'Historia Anglicana' (Douay, 1632), and the 'Prophecies' of Nostradamus (London, 1672). On both of these the Sheldon arms are quartered with those of Ralph's wife (Henrietta Maria, daughter of Thomas Savage, Viscount Rock Savage), and both books have written in them the motto, 'In Posterum,' apparently in Ralph's autograph. A third book, Greenway's translation of the 'Annals' of Tacitus (London, 1640), bears on its title-page the autograph of 'Geo. Sheldon,' and on the cover the Sheldon arms as here shown.

The next two volumes we may note are Thomas Mason's 'Of the Consecration of Bishops in the Church of England' (1613), and the 'Works' of King James I. (1616), both of them bearing the Hatton arms. From their dates these must therefore have belonged not to Elizabeth's favourite, whose arms are figured in Mr. Fletcher's article, since he died in 1591, but to a son of his cousin of the same name, of Clay Hall, Barking. This third Christopher Hatton was baptized and probably born in 1605, and was a prominent man during the reign of Charles I., by whom he was created Baron Hatton in 1643. He was responsible for an edition of the Psalms with prayers attached (1644), which went by the name of Hatton's 'Psalter,' and was philosopher enough to be able to make himself happy with his 'books and fiddles' while a Royalist exile.

A few of these early seventeenth-century books possess bindings interesting for other reasons besides their marks of ownership. Thus, a fine Hebrew folio is decorated not only with the arms of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, but with some striking examples of the handsome, if heavy, corner-pieces in vogue in the reign of James I. On a copy of Brent's 'History of the Council of Trent' the arms of Berkeley look all the better for being inclosed in a handsome scroll-work centrepiece. So again we find both fine cornerpieces and a good central stamp on the three volumes of the works of that learned divine William Perkins (London, 1612), which bear also the initials H. L. beneath a coronet. The owner was presumably Henry Yelverton, created Viscount Longueville in 1690, to whom also belonged a copy of the 1660 edition of More's 'Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness.' On the Perkins volumes his coroneted initials were plainly added as an afterthought, while a much smaller M. Y., inclosed in the cornerpieces as part of the original design, suggests that the volume had in the first instance belonged to Mary Yelverton, the wife of the Judge of Court of Common Pleas, who died in 1630.

The works of Perkins were popular in the seventeenth century, and Sir Wollaston Franks acquired another edition of them, that of 1626, bearing the arms of one of the descendants of Thomas Smythe, Farmer of the Customs in the reign of Elizabeth, whose arms combined with those of his wife, Alice Judde, were figured by Mr. Fletcher. The coat now in question may have belonged either to his grandson, Thomas, who was not created Viscount Strangford until two years after the publication of the book, or to the Viscount's brother, the ambassador to the Court of Russia, who fitted out an Arctic expedition, and has his munificence commemorated in the name of 'Smith's Sound.'

A copy of the 1617 edition of Spenser's 'Faery Queen,' bearing the initials M. C. beneath a coronet, offers another example of a mark of ownership attached by a descendant of the original possessor. Who M. C. was is explained by the pretentious inscription on a book-plate inside the cover, which proclaims itself the property of 'The Right Honb^le Mary, wife of Charles, Earle of Carnarvon & Sister of James, Earle of Abingdon.' The Earl of Carnarvon here named was the second earl, Charles Dormer, who died in 1709, and his countess was the daughter of Montague Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, by his second wife Bridget, Baroness Norreys of Rycote. This descent accounts for the inscription on the title-page, 'Norreys, 1647,' and we may conclude that the volume was at one time owned either by the Baroness Norreys or her first husband. The book-plate of the Countess of Carnarvon is here reproduced as presumably a rather early example of a lady's plate in the heraldic style. It certainly does not deserve the honour for its artistic merits, the design and engraving being as poor as the inscription is foolish.