The minutiæ into which the enthusiasts for the graphic French literature produced in the closing years of the ancient régime permit themselves to enter is rather bewildering to a novice or an outsider, and certainly asks as much study as it can well be worth. The cultivation of the pursuit has naturally brought into existence a small library of monographs, of which that by Cohen is one of the best known and the most frequently quoted. There is an equal degree of difference between the pictorial features of books produced in England and on the Continent during the past and the present centuries. In France there still reigns the spirit of enterprise conducive to the execution of high-class work; but among ourselves it is painful to contemplate the decline, not of power, but of encouragement, and the unhealthy tendency to a style of illustration which will not probably be very creditable to the country in retrospect. A collection of modern illustrated works of mixed origin may well dispense, except by way of sample and contrast, with much of the fantastic and preposterous creations of some of the latter-day masters.
The _Edition de Luxe_, the _Large_, _Larger_, and _Largest Paper_, the copy on yellow paper, blue paper, writing paper, on _papier de Hollande_, _de Chine_, or _d'Inde_, or on Japanese vellum, the very limited impression, are among the fancies and demands of the omnivorous past. A short study of the supplement to Bonn's _Lowndes_ and of Martin's _Privately Printed Books_ will suffice to show that not only a library, but a tolerably extended one, might be formed of these classes of literature exclusively; and indeed the thing has been more than once actually done. Utterson, Halliwell, Laing, Maidment, Eyton, Turnbull, and others have contributed to leave to us a voluminous inheritance of now rather neglected and undervalued curiosities of this kind. But even here the discriminating collector may still advantageously pick out items worth buying and holding, for in the case of every artificial _furore_ the good, bad, and indifferent are apt to rise and to fall together, while it is reserved only for the first to experience a revival--the Revival of the Fittest.