noticeable element in their art is that of the grotesque and burlesque,
never, of course, quite absent even from early books, but now most
prominent and most delightful. The defect of the art of this time is
lack of strength and austerity; its delicacy is above praise.

The middle of the century sees Petrarch, and with him the Renaissance
begins. Italy has been producing great men in every field, but the work
of Petrarch reached farther and was more enduring than that of any
other.

France, tortured by wars, put forth little in the middle years, but then
came Charles V., a King who was really interested in books, and the
library he formed at the Louvre gave a stimulus to book-production which
spread wide and lasted long. Under Richard II. and through his Queen,
Anne of Bohemia, a foreign influence makes itself felt in England, and
some lovely results are achieved; but on the whole English art is
waning.

The Universities, and to some extent the monasteries, were throughout
this century great customers for the bulky books of scholastic divinity
(Duns Scotus, Albertus, and the like) and the later generation of
commentators on the Bible, such as Nicolas de Lyra and Hugo de S. Caro.
Many shelves are filled with these.

_Fifteenth Century._--The fifteenth century is our last; it ends the MS.
period. Under the influence of the Renaissance, now enormously potent,
every Italian noble forms a library. The scholars are seeking out the
ninth-century copies of the classics, and they discard the Gothic
(black-letter) hands of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in
favour of the Carolingian minuscule (or, some say that of the twelfth
century). As early as 1426 we find books written in a script adapted and
refined from this; we call it a Roman hand, though the great centre of
its propagation seems to have been Florence. In all essentials it is the
parent of the type in which this page will be printed.

Italy, then, is the hub of the universe for books; and in Italy,
Florence, Naples, and Rome are the most active _nuclei_. We have a
record written by a Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano Bisticci, in the
form of short biographies of great persons, many of whom had dealt with
him. For some he provided whole libraries, as for Frederick, Duke of
Urbino, whose books are now mostly in the Vatican. Such a man as this
would not look at a printed book--which in Vespasiano's mind is, of
course, very greatly to his credit; for the press