Fac-similes of Initial Capital Letters used by our early Pinters from

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Publifhed as the Act directs Dee! 1809.

4471 to 1550.

Preliminary Disquisition.

T is very far from my intention to enter into an elaborate disquisition concerning the early state of the Arts of Engraving and Printing in this country. So little is known with certainty, and so frequent have been the contradictions of able writers, upon these subjects, that, in the present instance, I shall only give a brief but tolerably faithful outline of their

early progress, by way of introduction to a professed HISTORY OF PRINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN.

The Art of Engraving preceded the Art of Printing but a short time. Whatever were the absurdities propagated concerning the origin of both, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these have been materially rectified by the amusing and intelligent treatises of Marchand, Schoepflin, Meerman, Papillon, Fournier, Heinecken, Huber, Lambinet, Breitkopf, and Bartsch, published within the last century.

The little that is here necessary to say about the origin of the Art of Engraving abroad, is inserted in the note below. Of its intro

* In describing the origin of this beautiful and useful art, it will be necessary, in the first place, to notice the first efforts of engraving UPON WOOD. Playing cards, which

duction into this country a more detailed account may be expected.

The late ingenious, persevering, and ever to be respected Mr. Joseph Strutt, in tracing the earliest period of this art in Great

were perhaps the first legitimate effects of cutting upon wood, were known in Germany before the year 1376. See Heinecken's Idée Générale d'une Collection D'Estampes, p. 241. Buller, in his Recherches historiques sur les cartes a jouer, 1759. 8vo. had erroneously imagined that they were first introduced into France under the reign of Charles V. The earliest impression of a wood cut, with a date, not confined to the subject of card playing, is the famous print of St. Christopher and the Infant Jesus, which Heinecken discovered in the library of a convent at Buxheim near Memmingen, in Suabia, and which has the date of 1423. This great curiosity was found pasted within the binding of an old book printed in the 15th century-" carefully placed there, most probably, [says Heinecken] by one of the monks in former times from a wish to preserve it." It is now in the magnificent collection of Earl Spencer. See Huber's Notices des Graveurs, p. 47: Idem. Manuel des Amateurs de l'Art, vol. i. 86. Notwithstanding the express evidence of the antiquity of this cut, it may be questioned whether some early printed books, from wooden blocks, such as the Biblia Pauperum,' or Speculum Humanæ Salvationis,' do not exhibit specimens of engravings upon wood of nearly an equally ancient date. The date of these latter is certainly conjectural; but if, as Fournier supposes, the cuts were struck off sometime before the letter press was subjoined, their antiquity would not fall far short of that of the Buxheim print.

Of engraving UPON COPPER the earliest known impression is that executed by one Thomaso Finiguerra, a goldsmith of Florence, with the date of 1460 upon it. One of the following circumstances is supposed to have given rise to the discovery. Finiguerra chanced to cast or let fall a piece of copper, engraved and filled with ink, into melted sulphur; and observing that the exact impression of his work was left on the sulphur, he repeated the experiment on moistened paper, rolling it gently with a roller. This origin has been admitted by Lord Walpole and Mr. Landseer; but another has been also mentioned by Huber:-"It is reported," says he, "that a washer-woman left some linen upon a plate or dish on which Finiguerra had just been engraving; and that an impression of the subject engraved, however imperfect, came off upon the linen; occasioned by its weight and moistness. We learn also from Vasari (continues Huber) that as early as the year 1450 the same artist had engraved very ingeniously, upon a chalice, [or sacramental cup] some small figures of The Passion of our Saviour,' for the service of the church of St. John of Florence, &c. But [observes Huber] it is material to remark that we have no direct evidence whatever of the workmanship of Finiguerra; for his name is not subscribed to any of his productions. The efforts of Boticello and Baldini, his contemporaries and acquaintance, seem to be strengthened by somewhat less excep