Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/237

 Record of Bibliography and Library Literature. 225 educational, the most noteworthy being the splendid folio edition of Lyndewode's Constitutions Provinciates of 1506. After 1518 the busi- ness of the firm was carried on by Henry Pepwell, of whose publications Mr. Duff has traced thirteen, eight in 4to and five in 8vo, most of them school-books, or works of popular morality or devotion. Another very thorough piece of work in Part I. is Mr. Robert Proctor's account of the woodcut bearing the legend Accipies tanti doctoris dogmata sancti, and exhibiting a master, with a dove perched on his shoulder, instructing some very attentive young disciples. Ten different varieties of this cut, falling into five groups, have been distinguished, and they enable us to identify the various printers, Quentell, at Cologne, Schonsperger and Froschauer at Augsburg, Hans Reger at Ulm, Heinrich Gran at Hagenan, and others, by whom the books in which they occur were printed. The cut is only found on educational books, and its popularity seems to have lasted from 1491 to about the end of the century. In yet a third learned article, Dr. Sommer finally disposes of the theory maintained by M. Paulin Paris, that the authorship of the Recueil des histoires de Troye should be assigned, not to Raoul Lefevre, but to Guillaume de Failly, whom he proves to be identical with Guillaume Filastre, Bishop of Tournai, adding some interesting particulars, gained from a collation of eleven different manuscripts, as to the changes of plan during the compilation of the Recueil by Lefevre. Side by side with these heavy guns we have ranged a contribution by Mr. Andrew Lang in his lightest vein on " Names and Notes in Books," a long and fascinating article by Mr. Charles Elton which tells us a great deal about Queen Christina of Sweden and a little about her library, and a most heretical article by M. Octave Uzanne, tracing the history of the collecting and production of fine books in France during the present century, and predicting the speedy discarding of the worship of Incunabula in favour of the books reflecting the art of the day, which he himself has helped so largely to bring into fashion. Undoubtedly the value of most classes of Incunabula (illustrated books are a conspicuous exception) is slightly on the decline, while the prices fetched by some modern French books, extra- illustrated and beautifully bound, are very considerable. But a glance at the totals and averages of the Lignerolles sale, to which M. Uzanne rashly appealed while it was yet in the future, and of the best books at M. Uzanne's recent disposal of the superfluities of his own library, suffices to show that, however the values of modern books may be creeping up, they have as yet hardly come within sight of those realized by the masterpieces of ancient printing. In Part II. the contents are more uniformly solid than in its pre- decessor, and almost all of the articles are of permanent value. The first place is given to Dr. Maunde Thompson's first instalment of his promised series of papers on English illuminated manuscripts, the present article embracing the years A.D. 700-1066. Part of the ground for this period had been already traversed by the late Professor Westwood in his Facsimiles of the Miniatures and Ornaments of A nglo- Saxon and Irish Manuscripts, but by including in one survey the Southern manuscripts under classical, i.e., Roman, or Greco-Roman influence, and the Northern noes which mainly followed the Irish school, Dr. Thompson brings out several new points and treats the subject with much greater completeness. His article is illustrated by eight full-page plates, some of them of great beauty, while those of which it would be flattery to assert this are in- teresting as typical examples, or, as in the case of the drawings from the Paraphrase of the Pentateuch (MS. Claudius, B. iv.), as showing by their unfinished condition the method in which the draughtsmen went to work, the colours of the dresses being first daubed on in patches, without any