[Illustration: Text-fig. 105. "Chondrilla" [Colonna, Phytobasanos, 1592].]
The purchaser of 'The Garden of Flowers' receives detailed directions for the painting of the figures, which he is expected to carry out himself. The book is divided into four parts, appropriate to the four seasons, and each part is preceded by an encouraging verse intended to keep alive the owner's enthusiasm for his task. The stanza at the beginning of the last section seems to show some anxiety on the part of the author, lest the reader should have begun to weary over the lengthy occupation of colouring the plates. It reads as follows:--
"If hethertoe (my frende) you have, Performde the taske in hand: With ioy proceede, this last will be The best, when all is scande."
As we have already mentioned, it is not our intention to deal with the books published in the latter part of the seventeenth century. We may, however, for the sake of completeness, mention two or three examples in order to show the kind of work that was then being done. Paolo Boccone's 'Icones et Descriptiones' of 1674 was illustrated with copper-plates, some of which were remarkably subtle and delicate, while others were rather carelessly executed. Among slightly later works, we may refer to a quaint little Dutch herbal by Stephen Blankaart, and to the 'Paradisus Batavus' of Paul Hermann, both of which belong to the last decade of the century. The latter, which is an "Elzevir" with very good copper-plates, was published after the author's death, and dedicated, by his widow, to Henry Compton, Bishop of London.
In the plates which illustrate Blankaart's herbal, a landscape and figures are often introduced to form a background, and the low horizon, to which we referred in speaking of the 'Hortus Floridus,' is a very conspicuous feature. The picture of the Winter Cherry is here reproduced as an example (Text-fig. 106). As showing the complete revolution in the style of plant illustration in two hundred years, it is interesting to compare this drawing with that of the same subject in the German 'Herbarius' of 1485 (Text-fig. 78). It must be confessed that the fifteenth-century wood-cut, though far less detailed and painstaking, seizes the general character of the plant in a way that the seventeenth-century copper-plate somewhat misses.