rely religious publications, quite a large
number of secular books, and those of permanent and striking interest,
owed their origin to the same region, particularly to Amsterdam, the
Hague, Middelburg, Dort. The source of all this foreign production was
mainly either the employment of Englishmen and Scots abroad on
military service, or their residence there in exile or for other
purposes. Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and even Poland, lent their
presses to the British author; the scarce tracts by James Crichton
(the Admirable) proceeded from Milan or Venice. We know what important
centres for English controversial divinity and political
pamphleteering were Geneva, Basle, and Zuerich, and the last-named
place is particularly associated with the name of Christopher
Froeschover, printer of the Bible of 1550. A distinct feature in this
vast body of Continental typography connected with us is the curious
and often unique light which it incidentally throws on the lives of
our countrymen and countrywomen, segregated by their employments or
opinions from their compatriots at home, and obliged to resort to
printers ignorant of the language which they committed to type. A
tolerably exhaustive estimate may be found of this branch of the
subject by a reference to the _General Index_ of Hazlitt's COLLECTIONS
(1867-91).

To the Duke of Sussex's Catalogue, and those of Lea Wilson, George
Offor, Francis Fry, William Maskell, W. J. Loftie, W. J. Blew,
Farmer-Atkinson, Lord Ashburnham, and the Rev. W. Makellar of
Edinburgh, we must go for the means of bibliographically estimating
the editions of the Scriptures and the Prayer-Book; and the Huth and
Caxton Exhibition Catalogues should be consulted. The ordinary English
and American collector seldom goes beyond English, French, German, and
Latin Bibles. Of all these, not even excepting the Fust and Gutenberg
or Mazarin, the original impression of the Scriptures in French,
published at Paris and Antwerp in six volumes between 1523 and 1528,
is by far the rarest; and the next place or rank is perhaps due to the
German one, printed at Zuerich in the same number of volumes, 1527-29,
of which an imperfect copy is in the Huth Library. The Mazarin Bible
has grown rather commoner of late years. It is certainly much more so
than Coverdale's English one of 1535 in a perfect state, or Tyndale's
New Testament of 1526. It is a point about it not generally known,
that the extant copies on vellum and on p