When we pass from borrowing to buying we open up an endless field for investigation, and one rich in small surprises.
Mr. Falconer Madan showed me some years ago, in a Civil War Tract in the Thomason Collection at the British Museum, a very worn cut, French in appearance, representing S. John the Evangelist and the eagle by which he is symbolised. It puzzled me at the time, but I soon afterwards identified it with the printer's device of Robert Wyer, in use by him more than a hundred years earlier. Almost as great an age was probably attained by a head-piece of terminal archers, with rabbits, etc., which I first noticed in the 1598 edition of Sidney's 'Arcadia,' and found still retained in the fourteenth edition, dated 1670. The interval between these two editions of itself exceeds the threescore and ten years which ought to suffice for the life of a wood-block as of a man, but I have since found the same head-piece in a prayer book, printed about 1585, and as it is in no way appropriate to this, have no doubt that its original appearance was even earlier.
[Illustration: FROM GEOFFROY TORY'S 'CHAMPFLEURY,' 1529.]
In another rather amusing series of migrations my pride as a discoverer has been tempered by the verdict of a lynx-eyed friend that the blocks in question at one period of their career have been recut, but their history is still curious. If any one will turn to the 1575 edition of 'A Ryght pithy pleasaunt and merie Comédie. Intytuled Gammer Gurton's Needle. Played on stage, not longe ago in Christes Colledge in Cambridge,' he will see that the title-page of this our second printed comedy, 'made by Mr. S---- Mr. of Art,' and 'imprinted at London in Fleete streat beneth the Conduit at the sign of S. John Evangelist by Thomas Colwel,' is surrounded by a kind of garland supported by two fat little boys; and if we turn next to the last leaf of the 'Champfleury,' that most pedantical treatise, written and published by the French artist-printer, Geoffroy Tory in 1529, there the same not very beautiful design will confront us. The concatenation of the 'Champfluery' and 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' is of itself delightful, but chance has enabled me to add two additional incongruities, for I have found it again in a copy of the 'Christiani Hominis Institutio,' by Stephanus Paris, printed in 1552 by Michael Fezandat for Vivantius Gaulterot, who had published the second edition of the 'Champfleury' three years earlier, and once more in William Copland's edition, dated 1553, of Bishop Douglas's 'XII. Bukes of Eneados.' Thus we know within a few months the date at which this block, which had previously been recut, crossed the Channel, and there is some reason to believe that some more of Tory's old designs came over with it, for I have lately noticed three fragments of borders used in Tory's 'Horae' of 1525 reappearing in a 'Letter to Reginald Pole,' by Tunstall and Stokesley, printed by Wolfe in 1560. Like the larger design, these fragments have been recut, but with considerable skill, so that we may be sure that the recutting was done in France, and at no very long interval after 1525, the lines in the original blocks being so fine that they would soon need replacing.