evidences which might be offered to prove that coarseness of engraving in undated block-books is by no means proof of their greater age. The facts point the other way. The block-books which contain engravings of high merit are, as a rule, the oldest; those made in the third or fourth quarter of the fifteenth century show decided decline in skill. Mean as this book is, it does not fully show the degradation that printing subsequently suffered from the hands of unskillful engravers.
THE APOCALYPSE OF ST. JOHN.
This is the name of an early block-book almost as famous as the Bible of the Poor, and of which there are at least six distinct xylographic editions. Some of them have fifty, and others have forty-eight leaves, printed upon one side only of the leaf. The dissimilarities in the designs and the engraving of these editions are decided and unmistakable: they are, no doubt, impressions from different suites of blocks, and each edition may be regarded as the work of a different printer.
As a literary production, the Apocalypse has small merit It is not, as might be supposed, the text or an abridgment of the Book of Revelation. It is, in fact, only a book of pictures, and these pictures in many points border very closely on the ridiculous. One cannot shut his eyes to the ludicrous points, but neither can he overlook the fact that the designs of the book are not the work of an ignorant artist. Rudely as they have been cut, and badly as they were printed, there is strong character in the faces, and much artistic skill in the grouping of the figures. The designs are vigorous, but they are unlike the works of Van Eyck, or of the German artists of the period. There is nothing in the costumes or architecture which can be rated as decidedly German or Dutch. Chatto says the designs were probably intended to represent Mahomet as the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation, and that they may have been made by an exiled Byzantine artist who had been driven out of Constantinople after the taking of that city by the Turks in 1453. But this conjecture is not
