youthful production of some man who has afterwards become great turns
up. Of these theses and similar tracts a German, Count Dietrich,
collected some hundred and forty thousand, which are now in this
country.

Those collectors whose affections are invested in the devices or trade
emblems of special favourites among the old printers must not be passed
without a word of recognition.

Men who have had the opportunity of rummaging among old libraries in
their boyhood are the most likely to cultivate pets of this kind. There
is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold
serene classic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular
writer on the AEsthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual,"
ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly. To intellects not
far enough advanced to acknowledge the influence of such terms, or to
comprehend their application to what we should or should not like and
admire, there is a fortunate element even in their deficiencies. They
can admire the devices of the old printers from association with the
boyish days when they were first noticed, from an absolute liking for
their fantastic fancies, and possibly from an observation in some of
them of the indications of the gradual development of artistic purity
and beauty. In many of them in which the child has seen only an
attractive little picture, the man has afterwards found a touch of
poetic or religious thought.

There is the hand pouring oil into a lamp of pure Etruscan shape,
symbolical of the nutriment supplied to the intellectual flame. In
another, the gardener carefully plants the seedlings which are to bear
the fruit of knowledge to the coming generations; in another, the sun
rising bright over the eastern sea signifies the dawn of the restoration
of classical learning to the European nations.

Other interpretations of the kind, called quaint conceits, can be read
from these printers' devices. There is Gesner's Bibliotheca swarming
with frogs and tadpoles like a quagmire in honour of its printer, a
German Frog, latinised Christopherus Froshoverus. The _Quae Extant_ of
Varro, printed at Dort, are adorned with many lively cuts of bears and
their good-humoured cubs, because the printer's name is Joannis
Berewout. So the Aulus Gellius, printed by Gryphius of Lyons, more than
a hundred years earlier, begins and ends with formidable effigies of
griffins. The device of Michael and Phillip Lenoir