more original feeling, and showed greater variety and vivacity in their treatment, than the artists who had engraved the Biblia Pauperum. The latter volume contained, as has been seen, nearly the last impression of century-old pictorial types in the mediæval conventional manner; the Cologne Bible defined conceptions of Scriptural scenes anew, and these conceptions became conventional, and re-appeared for generations in other illustrated Bibles in all parts of Europe; not, however, because of an immobility of mind characteristic of the community, as in earlier times, but partly because the printers preserved and exchanged old wood-blocks, so that the same designs from the same blocks appeared in widely distant cities, and partly because it was less costly for them to employ an inferior workman to copy the old cut, with slight variations, than to have an artist of original inventive power to design a wholly new series. Thus the Nuremberg Bible of 1482 is illustrated from the same blocks as the Cologne Bible, and the cuts in the Strasburg Bible of 1485 are poor copies of the same designs. From the marginal border which encloses the first page of the Cologne Bible it appears that wood-engraving was already looked on, not only as a means of illustrating what was said in the text, but as a means of decoration merely. Here, among the foliage and flowers, are seen running animals, and in the midst the hunter, the jongleur, the musician, the lover, the lady, and the fool—an indication of delight in nature and in the variety of human life, which, simply because it is not directly connected with the text, is the more significant of that freer range of sympathy and thought characteristic of the age. Afterward these decorative borders, often in a satiric and not infrequently in a
