Ordiis Scti Bndicti.  Anno Sesquimillesimo KL. septembris [Hebrew].”  It is printed in a rude gothic letter; and a kind of fly leaf contains a wood-cut portrait of Alcuin.  The monastery, where this volume was printed, is now suppressed.  A pretty little volume—­“as fresh as a daisy” (so says my ms. note taken upon the spot) of the “Hortulus Rosarium de valle lachrymarum” (to which a Latin ode by S. Brandt is prefixed), printed by I. de Olpe, in 1499, in the original wooden binding—­closed my researches among the volumes executed in the fifteenth century.

As I descended into the sixteenth century, the choice was less, although the variety was doubtless greater.  A fine genuine copy of Geyler’s Navicula Fatuorum, 1511, 4to. in its original binding, was quickly noted down, and as quickly secured.  It was a duplicate, and a ducat made it my own.  It is one of the commonest books upon the continent—­although there was a time when certain bibliomaniacal madcaps, with us, pushed the bidding for this volume up to the monstrously insane sum of L42:[37]—­and all, because it was coated in a Grolier binding!  Among the theological books, of especial curiosity, my guides directed my attention to the following:  “Altera haec pars Testam^ti. veteris emendata est iuxta censuras Inquisitionis Hispanicae an^o 79.  Nouu testam. recusandu omnino est; rejicienduq. propter plurimos errores qui illius scholiis sunt inserti.”  This was nothing else than the younger R. Stephen’s edition of the vulgate Bible of 1556, folio, of which the New Testament was absolutely SEALED UP.  It had belonged to the library of the Jesuits.  There was a copy of Erasmus, “Expurgatus iuxta censuram Academiae Louaniae an^o 79.”  The name of the printer—­which in the preceding Bible had been tried to be cancelled—­was here uniformly erased:  but it was doubtless the Basil edition of Erasmus by good old honest Froben and his sons-in-law.[38]

What think you of undoubted proofs of STEREOTYPE PRINTING in the middle of the sixteenth century?  It is even so.  What adds to the whimsical puzzle is, that these pieces of metal, of which the surface is composed of types, fixed and immoveable, are sometimes inserted in wooden blocks, and introduced as titles, mottoes, or descriptions of the subjects cut upon the blocks.  Professor May begged my acceptance of a specimen or two of the types, thus fixed upon plates of the same metal.  They rarely exceeded the height of four or five lines of text, by about four or five inches in length.  I carried away, with his permission, two proofs (not long ago pulled) of the same block containing this intermixture of stereotype and block-wood printing.