Fine Books Part 16

Although woodcuts were considered sufficiently good for Plantin's Bible of 1566, for his great Polyglot it was indispensable to have t.i.tlepages engraved on copper, and to the first volume he prefixed no fewer than three, engraved by P. van der Heyden after designs by P. van der Borcht.

All of them are emblematical, the first symbolizing the unification of the world by the Christian faith and the four languages in which the Old Testament was printed in the Polyglott, the second the zeal of Philip II for the Catholic faith, the third the authority of the Pentateuch. While some volumes had no frontispiece others contained a few ill.u.s.trations, and the total number of plates was twenty-eight. Some of these were used again in Plantin's Bible of 1583, and Raphelengius, into whose possession the whole set pa.s.sed in 1590, used sixteen of them three years later to ill.u.s.trate the _Antiquitates Judaicae_ of Arias Monta.n.u.s.

For his Missals and Breviaries as for his Horae Plantin sometimes used woodcuts, sometimes copperplates. For his editions of the works of S.

Augustine and S. Jerome (1577) he caused really fine portrait frontispieces to be engraved by J. Sadeler from the designs of Crispin van den Broeck. As regards his miscellaneous secular books he was by no means given to superfluous ill.u.s.trations, and, as we have seen, continued to use woodcuts contemporaneously with plates. Probably his earliest secular engravings (published in 1566, but prepared some years earlier) are the anatomical diagrams in imitation of those in the Roman edition of _Valverde_ mentioned below, to which he prefixed a better frontispiece than that of his model. In 1574 he produced a fine book of portraits of physicians and philosophers, _Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum philosophorumque_, in sixty-eight plates, with letterpress by J. Sambucus. The next year he issued another ill.u.s.trated book, the _De rerum usu et abusu_ of Bernardus Furmerius, sharing the expense of it with Ph. Gallus, a print-seller, for whom later on he published several books on commission. From 1578 onwards he printed for Ortelius, the great cosmographer. In 1582 he published the _Pegasides_ of Y. B. Houwaert, in 1584 Waghenaer's _Spieghel der Zeevaerdt_, and other ill.u.s.trated books followed. But none of them, little indeed that Plantin ever produced, now excite much desire on the part of collectors.

Of what took place in other countries and cities in the absence of even tentative lists of the books printed after 1535 anywhere except in England it is difficult to say. In 1560 an anatomical book translated from the Spanish of Juan de Valverde was published at Rome with engraved diagrams of some artistic merit and a rather poorly executed frontispiece. In 1566 "in Venetia appresso Rampazetto," a very fine book of impresas, or emblematical personal badges, made its appearance under the t.i.tle _Le Imprese Ill.u.s.tre con espositioni et discorsi del S^or Ieronimo Ruscelli_, dedicated "al serenissimo et sempre felicissimo re catolico Filippo d'Austria." This has over a hundred engraved _Imprese_ of three sizes, double-page for the Emperor (signed G. P. F.), full-pagers for kings and other princely personages, half-pagers for ordinary folk (if any owner of an _impresa_ may be thus designated), and all these are printed with letterpress beneath, or on the back of them, and very well printed too. In another book of _Imprese_, published in this same year 1566, the text, consisting of sonnets by Lodovico Dolce, as well as the pictures, is engraved, or rather etched. This is the _Imprese di diuersi principi, duchi, signori, etc., di Batt^a Pittoni Pittore Vicentino_. It exists in a bewildering variety of states, partly due to reprinting, partly apparently to the desire to dedicate it to several different people, one of the British Museum copies being dedicated by Pittoni to the Earl of Arundel and having a printed dedicatory letter and plate of his device preceding that of the Emperor himself.

Another noteworthy Venetian book, with engraved ill.u.s.trations, which I have come across is an _Orlando Furioso_ of 1584, "appresso Francesco de Franceschi Senese e compagni," its engraved t.i.tlepage bearing the information that it has been "nuouamente adornato di figure di rame da Girolamo Porro," a little-known Milanese engraver, who had reissued Pittoni's _Imprese_ in 1578. The ill.u.s.trations are far too crowded with incident to be successful, and their unity is often sacrificed to the old medieval practice of making a single design ill.u.s.trate several different moments of the narrative. Their execution is also very unequal. Nevertheless, they are of interest to English collectors since, as we shall see, they served as models for the plates in Sir John Harington's version of the _Orlando_ in 1591. All of them are full-pagers, with text on the back, and the printer was also compliant enough to print at the head of each canto an engraved cartouche within which is inserted a type-printed "Argomento."

Of sixteenth century engraved book-ill.u.s.trations in France I have no personal knowledge. In Germany, as might be expected, they flourished chiefly at Frankfort, which in the last third of the century had, as we have seen, become a great centre for book-ill.u.s.tration. Jost Amman, who was largely responsible for its development in this respect, ill.u.s.trated a few books with copper engravings, although he mainly favoured wood.

But it is the work of the De Brys, Theodor de Bry and his two sons Johann Israel and Johann Theodor, which is of conspicuous importance for our present purpose, for it was they who originated and mainly carried out the greatest ill.u.s.trated work of the sixteenth century, that known to collectors as the _Grands et pet.i.ts voyages_. This not very happy name has nothing to do with the length of the voyages described, but is derived from the fact that the original series which is concerned with America and the West Indies is some two inches taller (fourteen as compared with twelve) than a subsequent series dealing with the East Indies. For the idea of such a collection of voyages Theodor de Bry was indebted to Richard Hakluyt, whose famous book _The Princ.i.p.all Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_, published in 1589, was in preparation when De Bry was in England, where he worked in 1587-8. The first volume, moreover, was ill.u.s.trated with engravings by De Bry after some of the extraordinarily interesting water-colour drawings made by an Englishman, John White, in Virginia, and now preserved in the British Museum.[67] This first part was published in Latin at Frankfort by J. Wechel in 1590 and a second edition followed the same year. A second part describing Florida followed in 1591, a third describing Brazil in 1592. By 1602 nine parts had been issued, all at Frankfort, though by different publishers, the name of J. Feyrabend being placed on the fourth, and that of M. Becker on the ninth. After an interval of seventeen years two more parts of the Latin edition (x. and xi.) were printed at Oppenheim "typis H. Galleri," and then an appendix to part xi. at Frankfort in 1620, where also were issued part xii. in 1624 and part xiii., edited by M. Merian, in 1634, this last being accompanied by an "Elenchus," or index-volume, to the whole series.

Parallel with this Latin series ran a German one with about the same dates. One or two parts were also issued in French and at least one in English. There is also an appendix of "other voyages" usually added, mostly French, and issued at Amsterdam, and of nearly every volume of the whole series there were several issues and editions, all of them with differences in the plates. The "Pet.i.ts voyages" followed a similar course, beginning in 1598 and ending in 1628. Although the engravings, many of which are placed unpretentiously amid the text, vary greatly alike in the interest of their subjects, the value of the original designs, and the skill of the engraving, taken as a whole they have given to these _Grands et pet.i.ts voyages_ a unique position among books of travel, and a small literature has grown up round them to certify the collector as to the best state of each plate and what const.i.tutes a complete set.

While the ill.u.s.trations to the Voyages formed their chief occupation, the De Brys found time to engrave many smaller plates for less important books. Thus in 1593 Theodor de Bry issued an emblem book _Emblemata n.o.bilitati et vulgo scitu digna_ (text in Latin and German), in which each emblem is enclosed in an engraved border, mostly quite meaningless and bad as regards composition, but of a brilliancy in the "goldsmiths'

style" which to lovers of bookplates will suggest the best work of Sherborn or French. The plates marked B and D, ill.u.s.trating the lines "Musica mortales divosque oblectat et ornat" and "c.u.m Cerere et Baccho Veneri solemnia fiunt," are especially fine and the "emblems" themselves more pleasing than usual.

In 1595 there was printed, again with Latin and German text, a _Noua Alphabeti effictio, historiis ad singulas literas correspondentibus_.

The _motif_ is throughout scriptural. Thus for A Adam and Eve sit on the crossbar on each side of the letter, the serpent rests on its peak amid the foliage of the Tree of Knowledge. In B Abel, in C Cain is perched on a convenient part of the letter, and so on, while from one letter after another, fish, birds, fruit, flowers, and anything else which came into the designer's head hang dangling on cords from every possible point.

Nothing could be more meaningless or lower in the scale of design, yet the brilliancy of the execution carries it off.

The year after this had appeared Theodor de Bry engraved a series of emblems conceived by Denis Le Bey de Batilly and drawn by J. J.

Boissard. The designs themselves are poor enough, but the book has a pretty architectural t.i.tlepage, and this is followed by a portrait of Le Bey set in an ornamental border of bees, flowers, horses, and other incongruities, portrait and border alike engraved with the most brilliant delicacy (see Plate x.x.xVII). In the following year, again, 1597, the two younger De Brys ill.u.s.trated with line engravings the _Acta Mechmeti Saracenorum principis_, and (at the end of these) the _Vaticinia Severi et Leonis_ as to the fate of the Turks, also the _David_ of Arias Monta.n.u.s. The plates are fairly interesting, but in technical execution fall far below those of their father.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xVII. FRANKFORT, DE BRY, 1596

LE BEY. EMBLEMATA. PORTRAIT OF AUTHOR BY T. DE BRY, AFTER J. J.

BOISSARD]

Turning now to England, we find engraving in use surprisingly early in some figures of unborn babies in _The Birth of Mankind_, translated from the Latin of Roesslin by Richard Jonas and printed in 1540 by Thomas Raynold, a physician, who five years later issued a new edition revised by himself, again with engravings. In 1545 there appeared a much more important medical work, a _Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio_ professedly by Thomas Geminus, a Flemish surgeon and engraver attached to the English Court. In reality this was a rather shameless adaptation of the _De Fabrica Humani Corporis_ of Vesalius (Basel, 1543), with engravings copied by Geminus from the woodcuts of his original. For us its chief interest lies in an elaborate engraved t.i.tlepage showing the royal arms surrounded by a wealth of architectural and strapwork ornament in the style, if not actually the work, of Peter c.o.c.k of Alost, as has been shown by Sir Sidney Colvin in the invaluable introduction to his _Early Engravings and Engravers in England_ (1905). In 1553 an English translation of the anatomy was published by Nicholas Hyll, and in a second edition of this, printed in 1559, a rather heavy and stiff portrait of Elizabeth replaces the royal arms, which were burnished out to make room for it. Geminus subsequently produced a much larger portrait of the Queen, set in an architectural frame studded with emblematical figures, and a royal proclamation forbidding unauthorized "Paynters, Printers, and Gravers" to meddle with so great a subject seems to have been provoked by his handiwork.

In 1563 John Shute for his work on _The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture_ produced four amateurish engravings to ill.u.s.trate four of the five "orders," a woodcut being considered good enough for the fifth.

In 1568 we find the first edition of the "Bishops'" Bible adorned with an engraved t.i.tlepage in the centre of which, in an oval, is a not unpleasing portrait of the Queen, holding sceptre and orb, set in a ma.s.s of strapwork, amid which are seated Charity and Faith with the royal arms between them, while below the portrait a lion and dragon support a cartouche enclosing a text. Besides this t.i.tlepage, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Franciscus Hogenberg, before the book of Joshua there is an engraved portrait of Leicester, while the "Blessed is the man" of the first Psalm is heralded by another engraved portrait which shows Lord Burghley holding in front of him a great B. In 1573 Remigius Hogenberg, brother of Franciscus, engraved after a picture by John Lyne a stiff but rather impressive portrait of Archbishop Parker, prefixed to some copies of his _De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britanniae_. The year before this the second edition of the "Bishops'" Bible had been enriched with a decorative engraved map of the Holy Land, and in 1574 Archbishop Parker employed John Lyne to engrave for the _De Antiquitate Academiae Cantabrigiensis_ of Dr. Caius (printed by Day) a plate of the arms of the colleges, a plan of the University schools, and a large map of the town. In 1579 there appeared a work which had occupied the intermediate five years, a series of maps of England from the drawings of Christopher Saxton, engraved by Augustine Ryther (like Saxton a native of Leeds), Remigius Hogenberg and others, and with a fine frontispiece showing the Queen seated in state beneath an architectural canopy, which Sir Sidney Colvin thinks may perhaps be the work of Ryther. Ryther was subsequently concerned with other maps, including the series ill.u.s.trating the defeat of the Armada (_Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera descriptio_), and other cartographers got to work who hardly concern us here. Two long engraved rolls, the first by Marcus Gheraerts, representing a procession of the Knights of the Garter (1576), the second by Theodor de Bry, from the designs of Thomas Lant, the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), although most safely preserved when bound in book form, can hardly be reckoned as books. Yet over the latter I must stop to confess a dreadful sin of my youth, when I jumped to the conclusion that the portrait on the first page stood for Sidney himself, whereas it really represents the too self-advertising Lant. That it appears in the sky, above the Black Pinnace which bore home Sidney's body, and itself bears the suggestive motto "G.o.d createth, Man imitateth, Virtue flourisheth, Death finisheth," may palliate but cannot excuse the crime which enriched an edition of _Astrophel and Stella_ with a portrait, not of Sidney, but of the ill.u.s.trator of his funeral.

Not until 1590, when Hugh Broughton's _Concent of Scripture_ was accompanied by some apocalyptic plates engraved by Jodocus Hondius (subsequently copied by W. Rogers), do we come across what can really be called engraved ill.u.s.trations in an English book, and these, which are of little interest, were speedily eclipsed the next year by Sir John Harington's _Orlando Furioso in English Heroical verse_ with its engraved t.i.tlepage and forty-six plates. Of these the translator writes in his introduction:

As for the pictures, they are all cut in bra.s.se, and most of them by the best workemen in that kinde, that haue bene in this land this manie yeares: yet I will not praise them too much, because I gaue direction for their making, and in regard thereof I may be thought partiall, but this I may truely say, that (for mine owne part) I have not seene anie made in England better, nor (in deede) anie of this kinde in any booke, except it were in a treatise, set foorth by that profound man, maister Broughton, the last yeare, upon the Reuelation, in which there are some 3. or 4. pretie figures (in octauo) cut in bra.s.se verie workemanly. As for other books that I haue seene in this realme, either in Latin or English, with pictures, as Liuy, Gesner, Alciats emblemes, a booke _de spectris_ in Latin, & (in our tong) the Chronicles, the booke of Martyrs, the book of hauking and hunting, and M. Whitney's excellent Emblems, yet all their figures are cut on wood, & none in metall, and in that respect inferior to these, at least (by the old proverbe) the more cost, the more wors.h.i.+p.

The pa.s.sage is of considerable interest, but hardly suggests, what is yet the fact, that, save for the addition on the t.i.tlepage of an oval portrait of the translator and a representation of his dog, all the plates in the book are closely copied from the engravings by Girolamo Porro in the Venice edition of 1584. The English t.i.tlepage was signed by Thomas c.o.c.kson. We are left to conjecture to whom Harington was indebted for the rest of the plates.

Although, as we shall see, from this time forward a great number of English books contain engraved work, those which can be said to be ill.u.s.trated during the next sixty years are few enough, a study of Mr.

A. M. Hind's very useful _List of the Works of Native and Foreign Line-Engravers in England from Henry VIII to the Commonwealth_,[68]

tempting me to place the number at about a score. The year after the _Orlando Furioso_ came another curious treatise by Hugh Broughton, not printed with type, but "graven in bra.s.se by J. H.," whom Sir Sidney Colvin identifies with Jodocus Hondius, a Fleming who lived in England from about 1580 to 1594, and may have done the plates in the _Concent of Scripture_ and some at least of those in the _Orlando_. Six years later (1598) we find Lomazzo's _Tracte containing the artes of curious Paintinge_ with an emblematical t.i.tlepage and thirteen plates by Richard Haydock, the translator, four of the plates being adapted from Durer's book on Proportion, and all of them showing very slight skill in engraving. In 1602 came Sir William Segar's _Honour, Military and Civil_, with eight plates showing various distinguished persons, English and foreign, wearing the robes and insignia of the Garter, the Golden Fleece, S. Michael, etc. Three of the plates are signed by William Rogers, the most distinguished of the English Elizabethan engravers, and the others are probably his also. Most of them are very dignified and effective in the brilliantly printed "first states" in which they are sometimes found, but ordinary copies with only the "second states" are as a rule disappointing.

The beginning of the reign of James I was directly responsible for one ambitious engraved publication, Stephen Harrison's _The Archs of Triumph erected in honor of the High and mighty prince James, the first of that name king of England and the sixt of Scotland, at his Maiesties Entrance and pa.s.sage through his Honorable City & Chamber of London vpon the 15th day of march 1603 [1604] Invented and published by Stephen Harrison Joyner and Architect and graven by William Kip_. Here an engraved t.i.tlepage, with dangling ornaments in the style of the De Bry alphabet, is followed by seven plates of the seven arches, the most notable of which (a pity it was not preserved) was crowned with a most interesting model of Jacobean London, to which the engraver has done admirable justice.

In 1608 came Robert Glover's _n.o.bilitas politica et civilis_, re-edited two years later by T. Milles as the _Catalogue of Honour_, with engraved ill.u.s.trations (in the text) of the robes of the various degrees of n.o.bility, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Renold Elstracke, the son of a Flemish refugee, and also two plates representing the King in a chair of state and in Parliament. After this we come to two works ill.u.s.trated by an English engraver of some note, William Hole, Tom Coryat's _Crudities_ (1611), with a t.i.tlepage recalling various incidents of his travels (including his being sick at sea) and five plates (or in some copies, six), and Drayton's _Polyolbion_ (1612, reissued in 1613 with the portrait-plate in a different state), with a poor emblematic t.i.tle, a portrait of Prince Henry wielding a lance, and eighteen decorative maps of England. In 1615 we come to a really well-ill.u.s.trated book, the _Relation of a Journey_, by George Sandys, whose narrative of travel in Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and parts of Italy, is accompanied with little delicately engraved landscapes and bits of architecture, etc., by Francis Delaram. The work of the decade is brought to a close with two print-selling ventures, the _Basili[omega]logia_ of 1618 and _Her[omega]ologia_ of 1620. The former of these works describes itself as being "the true and lively effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest untill this present: with their severall Coats of Armes, Impreses and Devises. And a briefe Chronologie of their lives and deaths. Elegantly graven in copper.

Printed for H. Holland and are to be sold by Comp.[ton] Holland over against the Exchange." The full set of plates numbers thirty-two, including eight additions to the scheme of the book, representing the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Anne Boleyn, a second version of Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry, and Prince Charles.

Fourteen of the plates, mostly the earlier ones, are signed by Elstracke, and Simon Pa.s.se and Francis Delaram each contributed four. It need hardly be said that they are of very varying degrees of authenticity as well as merit. Several of the later plates are found in more than one state.

With the second of the two ventures Henry Holland was also concerned, but the expenses of the book were shared by Crispin Pa.s.se and an Arnhem bookseller named Jansen. Its t.i.tle reads: "Her[omega]ologia Anglica: hoc est clarissimorum et doctissimorum aliquot Anglorum qui floruerunt ab anno Cristi MD. usque ad presentem annum MDCXX." It is in two volumes, the first containing thirty-seven plates, the second thirty. Two of these represent respectively Queen Elizabeth's tomb and the hea.r.s.e of Henry Prince of Wales. All the rest are portraits of the notable personages of the reigns of Henry VIII and his successors, some of them based on drawings by Holbein, the majority on earlier prints, and all engraved by William Pa.s.se (younger brother of Simon) and his sister Magdalena.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xVIII. LONDON. J. MARRIOT, 1638

QUARLES. HIEROGLYPHIKES OF THE LIFE OF MAN. PAGE 22

ENGRAVED BY W. MARSHALL]

The next decade was far from productive of works ill.u.s.trated with more than an engraved t.i.tlepage and a portrait, but in 1630 appeared Captain John Smith's _True Travels_ with several ill.u.s.trations, one of them by Martin Droeshout; in 1634-5 came Wither's _Emblems_, with plates by William Marshall, and in 1635 Thomas Heywood's _Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels_, with an engraved t.i.tle by Thomas Cecill and plates representing the several orders, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones being entrusted to John Payne, Dominations to Marshall, Powers and Princ.i.p.alities to Glover, Virtues to Droeshout, etc. Some of the plates record the name of the patron who paid for them, another suggestion that it was money which stood most in the way of book-ill.u.s.trating. In 1638 Marshall ill.u.s.trated Quarles's _Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man_, with engravings, most of which seem chiefly made up of a candle, but in one the candle is being extinguished by Death egged on by Time, and to this not very promising subject (Plate x.x.xVIII) Marshall, the most unequal engraver of his day, has brought some of his too rare touches of delicacy and charm. In 1640 Wenceslaus Hollar, whom Thomas Earl of Arundel had discovered at Cologne (he was born at Prague) and brought to England, published his charming costume book _Ornatus Muliebris Anglica.n.u.s_, and his larger work, _Theatrum Mulierum_, must have been almost ready when Charles I hoisted his standard at Nottingham, since it was published in 1643. After this the Civil War interfered for some time with the book trade.

While fully ill.u.s.trated books were thus far from numerous in the half century which followed the _Orlando Furioso_ of 1591, the output of engraved t.i.tlepages and portraits to be prefixed to books was sufficient to find work for most of the minor engravers. The earlier t.i.tlepages were mostly architectural and symbolical, their purport being sometimes explained in verses printed opposite to them, headed "The Mind of the Front." William Rogers engraved a t.i.tlepage to Gerard's _Herbal_ (1597), which is never found properly printed, and others to Linschoten's _Discourse of Voyages into y^e East and West Indies_ (1598), Camden's _Britannia_ (1600--a poor piece of work), and Moffett's _Theatrum Insectorum_, this last having only survived in a copy pasted at the head of the author's ma.n.u.script at the British Museum. William Hole did an enlarged t.i.tle for Camden's _Britannia_ (1607), t.i.tles for the different sections of Chapman's _Homer_, a portrait of John Florio for the Italian-English dictionary which he was pleased to call _Queen Anna's New World of Words_, a charming t.i.tlepage to a collection of virginal music known as _Parthenia_ (1611-12), another to Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_, and much less happy ones to Drayton's _Polyolbion_ (1612), and the _Works_ of Ben Jonson (1616).

The best-known t.i.tlepages engraved by Renold Elstracke are those to Raleigh's _History of the World_ (1614) and the _Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince James_ (1616), the latter a good piece of work which when faced, as it should be, by the portrait of the king by Simon van de Pa.s.se, makes the most decorative opening to any English book of this period. Pa.s.se himself was responsible for the very imaginative engraved t.i.tle to Bacon's _Novum Organum_ (1620), a sea on which s.h.i.+ps are sailing and rising out of it two pillars with the inscription: "Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia" (Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased). His son William, besides his work on the _Her[omega]ologia_, already mentioned, engraved a complicated t.i.tle for Chapman's version of _The Batrachomyomachia_ or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, humorously called _The Crowne of all Homer's Worckes_.

After 1620 the old architectural and symbolical t.i.tlepages began to be replaced by t.i.tles in compartments, in which a central cartouche is surrounded by little squares, each representing some incident of the book. Portraits of the author remained much in request, and nearly a hundred of these were done by William Marshall, who was employed also on about as many engraved t.i.tlepages. As has been noted, his work was strangely uneven, and he fully deserved the scorn poured on him by Milton for the wretched caricature of the poet prefixed to the _Poems_ of 1645. Yet Marshall could at times do a good plate, as, for instance, that in Quarles's _Hieroglyphikes_ already mentioned, a portrait of Bacon prefixed to the 1640 Oxford edition of his _Advancement of Learning_ and the charming frontispiece to Brathwait's _Arcadian Princess_. Marshall at his worst fell only a little below the work of Thomas Cross; at his best he rivalled or excelled the good work of Thomas Cecill and George Glover.

After Cromwell's strong hand had given England some kind of settled government the book market revived, and some ambitiously ill.u.s.trated books were soon being published. The too versatile John Ogilby, dancing-master, poet, and publisher, appeared early in the field, his version of the Fables of Aesop, "adorned with sculpture," being printed by T. Warren for A. Crook in 1651. The next year came Benlowe's _Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice_, a mystical poem, some copies of which have as many as thirty-six plates by various hands, with much more etching than engraving in them. In 1654 Ogilby produced his translation of Virgil, a great folio with plates dedicated to n.o.ble patrons by Pierre Lambart. Ogilby's other important ventures were the large _Odyssey_ of 1665, and the Aesop's _Fables_ of the same year, with plates by Hollar, D. Stoop, and F. Barlow, and two portraits of the translator engraved respectively by Pierre Lambert and W. Faithorne.

Faithorne embellished other books of this period, e.g. the Poems of the "Matchless Orinda" (1667), with portraits, and publishers who could not afford to pay Faithorne employed R. White. The presence of a portrait by White in a copy of the first edition of Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, to which it was very far indeed from certain that it really belonged,[69] has once made the book sell for over 1400, but save for the sake of completeness his handiwork is not greatly prized by collectors, nor is there any English ill.u.s.trated book of this period after the Restoration which is much sought after for the sake of its plates, although those of Ogilby's _Virgil_ were sufficiently well thought of to be used again for Dryden's version in 1697.

Meanwhile, books with ill.u.s.trations _en taille douce_ were being issued in some numbers both at Paris and at Amsterdam. In the former city Francois Chauveau (1613-76), in the latter Jan and Casper Luyken are credited by Mr. Hind (_A Short History of Engraving and Etching_, 1908) with having produced "hosts of small and undistinguished plates," and these d.a.m.ning epithets explain how it is that even patriotic French collectors like Eugene Paillet and Henri Beraldi thought it wise to leave the ill.u.s.trated books of the seventeenth century severely alone.

We meet the first advance guard of the brilliant French eighteenth century school of book-ill.u.s.tration in 1718, when a pretty little edition of _Les Amours de Daphnis et Chloe_ (as translated by Bishop Amyot from the Greek of Longus) made its appearance with twenty-eight plates by Benoit Audran, after the designs of no less a person than the Regent of France, and duly labelled and dated "Philippus in. et pinx.

1714." The plates vary very much in charm, but that with the underline _Chloe sauve Daphnis par le son de sa flute_ certainly possesses it, and one of the double-plates in the book, _Daphnis prend ses oyseaux pendant l'Hyver pour voir Chloe_, is really pretty. We find no other book to vie with this until we come to a much larger and more pretentious one, the works of Moliere in six volumes, royal quarto, published in 1734. This was ill.u.s.trated with thirty-three plates, in the mixture of etching and engraving characteristic of the French school of the day, by Laurent Cars, after pencil drawings by Francois Boucher, and by nearly two hundred vignettes and tailpieces (not all different) after Boucher and others by Cars and Francois Joullain. Another edition of this in four volumes with Boucher's designs reproduced on a smaller scale was published in 1741 and reprinted three times within the decade.

After the Moliere, books and editions which collectors take count of come much more quickly. There was an edition of Montesquieu's _Le Temple de Gnide_ in 1742 (imprint: Londres), a _Virgil_ in 1743 with plates by Cochin, engraved by Cochin pere, the _Contes_ of La Fontaine (Amsterdam, 1743-5) also ill.u.s.trated by Cochin, Guer's _Moeurs et usages des Turcs_, with plates after Boucher (1746), an edition of the works of Boileau in five volumes, with vignettes by Eisen and tailpieces by Cochin (1743-5), and in 1753 a _Manon Lescaut_ (imprint: Amsterdam) with some plates by J. J. Pasquier, which are stiff, and others by H. Gravelot, which are feeble.

In the four-volume edition of the _Fables_ of La Fontaine (1755-9) with ill.u.s.trations after J. B. Oudry, we come to a very ambitious piece of work, handsomely carried out, which a book-lover may yet find it hard to admire. Oudry's designs are always adequate, and have more virility in them than is often found in the work of this school, and they are competently interpreted by a number of etchers and engravers, some of whom, it may be noted, worked together in pairs on the same plate, so that we find such signatures as "C. Cochin aqua forti, R. Gaillard caelo sculpsit," and "Grave a l'eau forte par C. Cochin, termine au burin par P. Chenu"--a very explicit statement of the method of work. But adequate as the plates may seem, if they are judged not as book-ill.u.s.trations but as engravings, no one could rate them high, and as a book what is to be said of an edition of La Fontaine's _Fables_, which fills four volumes, each measuring nearly nineteen inches by thirteen? The bookman can only regard such a work as a portfolio of plates with accompanying text, and if the plates as plates are only second rate, enthusiasm has nothing to build on.

We return to book-form in 1757, when Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ was published in Italian (imprint: Londra) in five octavo volumes, with charming vignettes and ill.u.s.trations mostly by Gravelot, although a few are by Boucher and Eisen. Gravelot, who was more industrious than successful as an ill.u.s.trator, is seen here to advantage, and deserves some credit for having made his designs not less but more reticent than the stories he had to ill.u.s.trate. This praise can certainly not be given to the famous 1762 edition of the _Contes_ of La Fontaine, the cost of which was borne by the Fermiers-Generaux (imprint: Amsterdam). The _fleurons_ by Choffard are throughout delightful and the plates are brilliantly engraved, but the lubricity of Eisen's designs is wearisome in the first volume and disgusting in the second, and possessors of the book are not to be envied. It is to be regretted that the next book we have to notice, the _Contes Moraux_ of Marmontel (3 vols., 1765), has very little charm to support its morality, the plates after Gravelot being poor, while the head- and tailpieces, or rather the subst.i.tutes for them, are wretched. A much better book than either of these last is the edition in French and Latin of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ in four quarto volumes (1767-71); with plates after Boucher, Eisen, Gravelot, and Moreau, and headpieces by Choffard at the beginning of each book. The imprint, "A Paris, chez Leclerc, Quai des Augustins, avec approbation et privilege du Roi," prepares us to find that the designers have kept their licence within bounds, and many of the plates have a combined humour and charm which are very attractive. If I had to choose a single plate to show Gravelot at his best, I doubt if prolonged search would find any success more complete than that of the ill.u.s.tration to Book I, xi., _Deucalion et Pyrrha repeuplant la Terre, suivant l'Oracle de Themis_ (see the frontispiece to this volume, Plate I), and though Eisen was a much better artist than Gravelot, his _Apollon gardant les troupeaux d'Admet, dans les campagnes de Messene_ (II, x.) is certainly one of his prettiest pieces.

[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xIX. PARIS, LAMBERT, 1770.

DORAT. LES BAISERS. PAGE WITH ENGRAVED HEADPIECE AFTER EISEN]

During the next few years ill.u.s.trated books became the fas.h.i.+on, so that in 1772 Cazotte wrote _Le diable amoureux, nouvelle d'Espagne_, with the false imprint Naples (Paris, Lejay) and six unsigned plates, said to be by Moreau after Marillier, on purpose to ridicule the craze for putting ill.u.s.trations into every book. In 1768 the indefatigable Gravelot had ill.u.s.trated an edition of the works of Voltaire, published at Geneva, with forty-four designs. In 1769 _Les Saisons_, a poem by Saint Lambert, was published at Amsterdam, with designs by Gravelot and Le Prince and _fleurons_ by Choffard. In the same year there was published at Paris Meunier de Queslon's _Les Graces_, with an engraved t.i.tle by Moreau, a frontispiece after Boucher, and five plates after Moreau. In 1770 came Voltaire's _Henriade_ with ten plates and ten vignettes after Eisen, and more highly esteemed even than this, Dorat's _Les Baisers_ (La Haye et Paris), with a frontispiece and plate and forty-four head- and tailpieces, all (save two) after Eisen, not easily surpa.s.sed in their own luxurious style (see Plate x.x.xIX). In 1771 Gravelot, more indefatigable than ever, supplied designs for twenty plates and numerous head- and tailpieces for an edition of Ta.s.so's _Gerusalemme Liberata_, and was honoured, as Eisen had been in the Fermiers-Generaux edition of La Fontaine's _Contes_, by his portrait being prefixed to the second volume. In 1772 a new edition of Montesquieu's _Le Temple de Gnide_, in which the text was engraved throughout, was ill.u.s.trated with designs by Eisen, brilliantly interpreted by Le Mire, and Imbert's _Le Jugement de Paris_ was ill.u.s.trated by Moreau, With, _fleurons_ by Choffard. In 1773 _Le Temple de Gnide_ was versified by Colardeau, and ill.u.s.trated by Monnet, and selections from Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, and Moschus by Eisen, while Moreau and others ill.u.s.trated the _Chansons_ of Laborde in four volumes and the works of Moliere in six. After this the pace slackened, and we need no longer cling to the methods of the annalist.

Moreau ill.u.s.trated Saint Lambert's _Les Saisons_ and Fromageot's _Annales du regne de Marie Therese_ (both in 1775), Marmontel's _Les Incas_ (1777), the seventy-volume Voltaire (1784-9), _Paul et Virginie_ (1789), and many other works, living on to ill.u.s.trate Goethe's _Werther_ in 1809; other books were adorned by Marillier, Cochin, Duplessis, Bertaux, Desrais, Saint Quentin, Fragonard, Gerard, and Le Barbier, and the fas.h.i.+on survived the Revolution and lingered on till about 1820.

We must go back now to England, where at the end of the seventeenth century the requirements of book-ill.u.s.tration were neglected, partly because of the growing taste for a neat simplicity in books, partly because the chief English engravers all devoted themselves to mezzotint.

A few foreigners came over to supply their place, and Michael Burghers, of Amsterdam, ill.u.s.trated the fourth edition of _Paradise Lost_, a stately folio, in 1688, with plates which enjoyed a long life and were also imitated for smaller editions. Burghers also ill.u.s.trated the Oxford almanacs, and supplied frontispieces to the Bibles and other large books issued by the University Press up to about 1720. Another Dutchman who came to England not much later (in about 1690) was Michael Van der Gucht, who worked for the booksellers, as his children did after him.

How low book-ill.u.s.tration had fallen in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century may be seen by a glance at the wretched plates which disfigure Rowe's Shakespeare in 1709, the first edition on which an editor and an ill.u.s.trator were allowed to work their wills. The year after this Louis Du Guernier came to England, and was soon engaged in the not too patriotic task of helping Claude Du Bosc to ill.u.s.trate the victories of Marlborough. In 1714 he and Du Bosc were less painfully, though not very successfully, employed in making plates for Pope's _Rape of the Lock_. Du Bosc subsequently worked on the _Religious Ceremonies of all Nations_ (1733), an English edition of a book of Bernard Picart's, and on plates for Rapin's _History of England_ (1743), but he was far from being a great engraver. It is a satisfaction that the plates to the first edition of _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719) were engraved by two Englishmen, and not very badly. Their names are given as "Clark and Pine," the Clark being presumably John Clark (1688-1736), who engraved some writing-books, and the Pine, John Pine (1690-1756), who imitated some designs by Bernard Picart to the book of Jonah in 1720, and may have been a pupil of his at Amsterdam.

It should, perhaps, have been mentioned that two years before _Crusoe_ an English engraver, John Sturt (1658-1730), produced a Book of Common Prayer, of which the text as well as the pictures was engraved. This is rather a curiosity than a work of art, the frontispiece being a portrait of George I made up of the Creed, Lord's Prayer, Ten Commandments, Prayer for the Royal Family, and Psalm XXI. written in minute characters, instead of lines. Sturt produced another engraved book, _The Orthodox Communicant_, in 1721.

In 1723 William Hogarth began what might have proved a notable career as a book-ill.u.s.trator had not he soon found more profitable work. He ill.u.s.trated the Travels of Aubry de la Mottraye in 1723, Briscoe's _Apuleius_ (1724), Cotterel's translation of _Ca.s.sandra_ (1725), Blackwell's _Compendium of Military Discipline_ (1726), and (also in 1726) Butler's _Hudibras_, his plates to which, though grotesque enough, show plenty of character. For some years after this he worked on frontispieces, e.g. to Leveridge's _Songs_ (1727), Cooke's _Hesiod_ (1728), J. Miller's comedy, _The Humours of Oxford_ (1729), Theobald's _Perseus and Andromeda_ (1730), and in 1731 to a Moliere, Fielding's _Tragedy of Tragedies_, and Mitch.e.l.l's _Highland Fair_. But the success of his set of prints on "The Harlot's Progress" diverted him from bookwork, although many years after he contributed frontispieces to Vols. II and IV of _Tristram Shandy_, and in 1761 a head-and tailpiece (engraved by Grignion) to a Catalogue of the Society of Arts.

In 1733 Hubert Gravelot was invited from France by Du Bosc to help in ill.u.s.trating Picart's _Religious Ceremonies_. He ill.u.s.trated Gay's _Fables_ in 1738, Richardson's _Pamela_ in 1742, Theobald's _Shakespeare_ in 1740, and, mainly after Hayman, Hanmer's in 1744-6.

Neither of the sets of Shakespeare plates deserves any higher praise than that of being neat and pretty, but at least they were a whole plane above those in Rowe's edition.

The year after Gravelot came to England, in 1733, Pine produced the first volume of his _Horace_, engraved throughout, and with head- and tailpieces in admirable taste. The second volume followed in 1737, and in 1753 the first of an ill.u.s.trated _Virgil_ which Pine did not live to complete.