16 JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS. 
the miller, taking grain on his ass’s back to the mill with the quaint 
old water-wheel ; or with the burly peasant, carrying on his own back 
from the mill a sack of meal to his distant cottage. The benignity 
of the infant Saviour who carries the world in his hand, and the fear, 
humility and astonishment on the upturned face of St. Christopher, 
are admirably expressed. 
Block-books, Xylographs as they are called, were the immediate” 
heralds of printing with types. For the most part they were printed 
with a brownish-grey ink, in which there was little or no oil ; and in 
a similar way to the saint pictures. Some of the block-books had 
no text ; others had no pictures ; but most of the copies known 
have both text and pictures. Some of them are tinted with colour, 
atter the manner of the St. Christopher, others are uncoloured.. 
The Spencer Library contains fourteen bleck-books ; and Mr. 
Hessels says twenty of German and ten of Netherlandish origin are 
known. One of the largest block-books, that of the Apocalypsis, or 
revelations to St. John, has fifty leaves printed on one side only. 
The Liblia Pauperum, the best-known of these books, has forty 
leaves, on which are one hundred and twenty pictures illustrating as 
many dramatic scenes from Bible history. Verses of scripture and 
skeleton sermons make up a printed text on each page. Although 
called the Bible of the poor, it is said, the book was designed to aid 
the less learned of the clergy, and was really the Lzblia pauperum 
predicatorum. 
In museums and great libraries, a few playing cards, pictures of 
saints, and block-books have been preserved from times prior to the 
middle of the fifteenth century. Competent authorities report that 
these are imprints from pictures and writing engraved on blocks cut 
plank-wise or parallel with the grain of the wood ; and were taken 
on paper pressed with a roller, or by friction, to receive the print, 
just as an engraver takes trial proofs of his work to-day. They were 
no doubt the work of monks or of professional scribes ; for so far 
as classical writings were preserved at all, they were preserved by 
monastics ; and monks also furnished manuscript books of amuse- 
ment, instruction, and devotion, to the few who could profit by their 
use. Whether we have had left to us full record of the tentative 
stages through which the art of printing passed during the first half 
of the fifteenth century is more than doubtful. As D’Israeli, the 
