books of Cologne the greater self-restraint and sense of proportion, in those of Augsburg the greater variety, vivacity, and vigor, in those of Nuremberg the greater exaggeration and grotesqueness. In the publications of some cities he would come upon the burning questions of that generation: the siege of Rhodes by the Turks, the wars of Charles the Bold against Switzerland, the martyrdom of John Huss; elsewhere he would see naïve conceptions of mediæval romance and chivalry, and not infrequently, as in the Boccaccio of Ulm, grossnesses not to be described; at Strasburg he would hardly recognize Horace and Virgil with their Teutonic features and barbaric garb; while at Mayence botanical works, which strangely mingle science, medicine, and superstition, would excite his wonder, and at Ulm military works would picture the forgotten engines of mediæval warfare; in the Netherlands, too, he would discern little difference in literature or in design; everywhere he would find the unevenness of Gothic taste—one moment creating works with a certain boldness and grandeur of conception, the next moment falling into the inane and the ludicrous; everywhere German realism making each person appear as if born in a Rhine city, and each event as if taking place within its walls; everywhere, too, an ever-widening interest in the affairs of past times and distant countries, in the thought and life of the generations that were gone, in the pursuits of the living, and the multiform problems of that age of the Reformation then coming on. It is impossible to turn from this wide survey without a recognition of the large share which wood-engraving, as the suggester and servant of printing, had in the progress made toward civilization in the North during that century. Woltmann does not over-state the fact when
