1^ 



1895.] -*•" [Rosengarten. 



only great masterpieces of pulpit eloquence, sucli as Bossuet's immortal 

 sermons, but they were printed with noble and serious splendor. The 

 great period of illustrated books was that of the eighteenth century, audit 

 was at its best from 1750 to 1780. The poorest volumes had exquisite 

 vignettes, and worthless verse or prose was made attractive by the capital 

 illustrations, and a wit of the time said that the beaux esprits were like 

 shipwrecked mariners, "ils se sont sauves paries planches." The school 

 of French illustrators of that time, with its traditions, its discipline, its 

 great artists, each with his own style, yet all full of unity in their collec- 

 tive work, really illustrative of the text, was admirably exhibited. With 

 the troubled times of the French Revolution, art too declined, but it 

 revived with the romanticism of our own century, and showed thoroughly 

 French liveliness. Then, after Meissonier and other really great masters, 

 came a new eclipse, from 1850 to 1870, when Gustave Dore was the only 

 famous name, his powerful inventive genius and his extreme abundance 

 of work marred by careless execution. With 1870 began a new period of 

 works of art and luxury. Many of them have already passed into oblivion 

 or that abyss of second-hand stalls and low prices that properly mark 

 their real value or valuelessness, but there remains a wealth of really good 

 work. Many of the original drawings by the best artists were in the ex- 

 hibition, and not only their designs for books, but for fans, posters and 

 advertisements. The engravers on wood, too, were there, and the 

 original designs from many famous hands were placed alongside the 

 reproductions, to show how much credit belongs to the engraver, and the 

 perfection of the typographic and other processes, both in black and white 

 and in colors. Even in photographic illustrations there was evidence of 

 art in the choice of subjects, in the grouping and composition. A very 

 competent critic, M. Leon Gruel, himself one of the great Paris book- 

 binders, and the owner of a remarkable collection of bindings and of 

 everything that illustrates this fine art, has given a capital account of the 

 value and importance of the retrospective exhibition of bookbinding, to 

 which he was one of the largest contributors. He loaned a copy of an 

 unknown edition of a grand folio "Speculum morale," without date or 

 name of printer, but certainly not later than 1477, for the binding is dated 

 1478. Gruel describes the binding with all the love of a collector and the 

 critical acumen of a bookbinder. The book was bound by one of his great 

 predecessors as a gift of the Emperor Maximilian, and it is both out- 

 wardly and inwardlya fine example of the artistic in printing, illuminating 

 and binding. The next of M. Gruel's exhibits has in golhic characters 

 the name of the binder, for in the fifteenth century and in the beginning 

 of the sixteenth century, the bookbinders took an honest pride in their 

 work, and perpetuated their names on it, often by religious texts in which 

 they commended themselves to the protection of their patron saints. 

 Each bookbinder had liis own particular saint, and St. Sebastian, St. 

 Maurice, St. Barbe, St. Nicholas, are thus stamped on the bindings, often 

 with an humble petition for protection, signed by the bookbinder, and 



