y of the _History
of Halifax_, with a view of the place thus given on the leaves, is a
favourable illustration of a practice which was formerly carried out
on an extensive scale, and of course with very unequal results. A
brisk demand arose a short time since for this branch of ingenuity;
but it has probably ere now subsided, having been in response to a
call for the artist by one or two collectors. Of course, the prices
advanced instantaneously to high-water mark, from the certainty that
the craze was ephemeral.

But the school of Edwards of Halifax probably borrowed the idea from
earlier men, who had occasionally decorated the edges of books in this
way, and we may instance Samuel Mearne, bookbinder to Charles II., by
whom a copy of North's _Plutarch_, 1657, was clothed in a richly gilt
morocco vesture, the leaves gilt and painted with flowers. Mearne also
introduced what is known as the cottage-roof pattern.

There are two fashions in the costlier department of binding which
have recommended themselves to adoption by some connoisseurs in this
country, and to which we do not find it easy to reconcile our taste:
the investiture of old English books in Parisian liveries and their
treatment by our own binders in the French style. Both courses of
proceeding strike us, we have to confess, as equally unsatisfactory.
There is an absence of harmony and accord between the book and its
cover, like dissonant notes in music. At the same time, Bedford was
fairly successful in copying the French manner for foreign works, and
his productions of this class are very numerous.

The practice of clothing English volumes in foreign liveries was
occasionally followed in early times. Messrs. Pearson & Co. bought at
Paris some years ago a lovely copy of Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-Book,
1590, in a richly gilt contemporary French, perhaps Lyonnese, calf
binding. The work was executed for an Englishman resident abroad, more
probably than for a local collector. But these instances are rare. One
of a different character occurred to our notice in a copy of Whitney's
_Choice of Emblems_, printed at Leyden in 1586, and still preserved in
the old Dutch boards--old, but not coeval.

Of amateur binding all countries have had their examples to show, and
here we do not intend the limitation of the artist to a particular
pattern and material chosen by his employer, such as the Hollis plain
red morocco, or the Duke of Roxburghe's half-morocco with marble