Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/61

Rh many manuscripts written in it in their great library, then one of the finest in Europe. The first French city to issue French books from its presses was Lyons, which had learned the arts of printing and of wood-engraving from Basle, Geneva, and Nuremberg, in consequence of their close commercial relations. If a few doubtful and scattered examples of early work be excepted, it was in these Lyonese books that French wood-engraving first appeared. From the beginning of printing in France, Lyons was the chief seat of popular literature, and the centre of the industry of printing books in the vulgar tongue, as Paris was the chief seat of the literature of the learned, both in Latin and French, and devoted itself to reproducing religious and scientific works. At the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the Lyonese presses issued the largest number of first editions of the popular romances, which were sought, not merely by French purchasers, but throughout Europe. These books were meant for the middle class, who were unable to buy the costly manuscripts, illuminated with splendid miniatures, in which literature had previously been locked up. They were not considered valuable enough to be preserved with care, and have consequently become scarce; but they were published in great numbers, and exerted an influence in the spread of literary knowledge and taste which can hardly be over-estimated. Woodcuts were first inserted in them about 1476; but for twenty years after this wood-engraving was practised rather as a trade than an art, and its products have no more artistic merit than similar works in Germany.