Note 33 — EARLY PRINTING.

The British Museum now possesses a remarkably fine series of these early works. They originated in the large sheet woodcuts, or "broadsides," representing saints, or scenes from saintly legends, used by the clergy as presents to the peasantry or pilgrims to certain shrines—a custom retained upon the Continent to the present time; such cuts exhibiting little advance in art since the days of their origin, being almost as rude, and daubed in a similar way with coarse colour. One ancient cut of this kind in the British Museum, representing the Saviour brought before Pilate, resembles in style the pen-drawings in manuscripts of the fourteenth century. Another exhibits the seven stages of human life, with the wheel of fortune in the centre. Another is an emblematic representation of the Tower of Sapience, each stone formed of some mental qualification. When books were formed, a large series of such cuts included pictures and type in each page, and in one piece. The so-called Poor Man's Bible (an evidently erroneous term for it, the invention of a bibliographer of the last century) was one of these, and consists of a series of pictures from Scripture history, with brief explanations. It was most probably preceded by the block books known as the Apocalypse of St. John, the Cantico Canticorum, and the Ars Memorandi.