ator has painted a preliminary border or initial
letters; even the rubrication, where it exists, is usually a
disfigurement; while as for pictures, it has been unkindly said that
inquiry whence they were obtained is superfluous, since any boy with a
knife could have cut them as well.

Making its start under these unfavourable conditions, the English
book-trade was exposed at once to the full competition of the
Continental presses, Richard III. expressly excluding it from
the protection which was given to other industries. Practically all
learned books of every sort, the great majority of our service-books,
most grammars for use in English schools, and even a few popular books
of the kind to which Caxton devoted himself, were produced abroad for
the English market and freely imported. Only those who mistake the
shadow for the substance will regret this free trade, to which we owe
the development of scholarship in England during the sixteenth century.
None the less, it was hard on a young industry, and though Pynson,
Wynkyn de Worde, the Faques, Berthelet, Wolfe, John Day, and others
produced fine books in England during the sixteenth century, the start
given to the Continental presses was too great, and before our printers
had fully caught up their competitors, they too were seized with the
carelessness and almost incredible bad taste which marks the books of
the first half of the seventeenth century in every country of Europe.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, as is well known, the
French thought sufficiently well of Baskerville's types to purchase a
fount after his death for the printing of an important edition of the
works of Voltaire. But the merits of Baskerville as a printer, never
very cordially admitted, are now more hotly disputed than ever; and if I
am asked at what period English printing has attained that occasional
primacy which I have claimed for our exponents of all the bookish arts,
I would boldly say that it possesses it at the present day. On the one
hand, the Kelmscott Press books, on their own lines, are the finest and
the most harmonious which have ever been produced; on the other, the
book-work turned out in the ordinary way of business by the five or six
leading printers of England and Scotland seems to me, both in technical
qualities and in excellence of taste, the finest in the world, and with
no rival worth mentioning, except in the work of one or two of the best
firms in the United