These considerations may help to account for the historic fact that the use of engraved seals for impressing soft substances preceded by so many centuries the invention of the art of printing by the trans ference of a pigment, or, in other words, by means of coloured stamps or types. Nevertheless the principle of an engraved or uneven sur face might still for a particular purpose be called in to the aid of the vrocess of pigment-printing, although it had nothing to do with the suggesting of that process. Suppose the writing which is to be trans ferred by such mode of printing to he traced in visible black characters upon a smooth surface of wood or metal, how is the pigment to be most conveniently renewed every time it gets dry or faint With an even surface it is evident that this could only be done by the tedious method of retracing every line of the writing with a pen or brush, a method which—besides its consumption of time, making printing, in fact, as slow as writing—would probably be found to be inefficient, as leaving the page dry or half dry in one part before it could be inked over in another. But by either cutting hollows for the ink, or causing the characters to stand out in relief, the great advantage is gained of being able to spread the pigment by a few sweeps of the brush along every line which it ought to colour, without leaving any of it upon the intervening parts of the wood or metal : in the case of hollow lines being cut (as in copperplate-printing), the ink that is spread in the first instance over the whole surface is easily wiped away from the rest without being taken out of the hollows.
At this point, then, we may be said to have at last obtained the art of printing in a practical shape. The art was now invented. This is precisely the art of printing as it bail been known in China since the middle of the 10th century, when it is said to have been discovered by a minister of state named Foong-taon, and as it is still practised there. The page of writing to be multiplied is pasted down upon the smooth surface of a prepared block, commonly of pear-tiee, on which it leaves an impression of the characters in an inverted form,and then the block thus marked is made ready to be printed from, by outing away all the blank parts of the face of the wood, and the lines forming the characters are thus left in relief, so as alone to receive the ink every time the brush is applied.
In such a language as the Chinese, which is without an alphabet, or at least in which the elementary characters have not been reduced to the same limited and commodious number as in most other languages, by making them represent sounds instead of ideas or things, this, or the lithographic process, are the only kinds of printing that are generally applicable. The subsequent improvements or extensions of the principle are all dependent upon the common alphabetic mode of writing.
Even in Europe, however, although the mode of writing was alpha betic, it was the Chinese mode of printing that was first practised. Some have even supposed that the knowledge of the art was originally obtained from the Chinese; and indeed, besides what other less direct communication there may have been, Marco Polo, who returned from China about the end of the 13th century, had seen and described at least one application of the invention in that country, the fabrication of a species of paper-money by stamping it with a seal covered with cinnabar (vermilion). But, as far as we can trace, it was not till fully
a century after this that even this simplest kind of printing began to be practised in Europe. It appears to have been first applied to the fabrication of playing-cards and manuals of popular devotion, the latter for the most part consisting, like the cards, of merely a single page, though in some instances assuming the form of little books of several pages. It is believed that about the year 1400, or soon after, both these articles, which had previously been manufactured by hand, and each copy of course by a separate operation, began to be multi plied, like the Chinese paper-money, from engraved blocks or stamps. There is no record of this innovation, but the fact is inferred from the perfect similarity of several copies of the same page, which could only have been produced by their having all been impressions from a common original. The playing-cards thus fabricated are merely pictures ; but many of the devotional manuals, besides pictures, which in these also fill the greater part of each page, present short texts from Scripture, and other examples of engraved letters and words. It is evident, how ever, that the essence of the new art is as much in the pictures as in the legends, which are only pictures of another kind.
The sera of these block prints and books, as they are called, may be stated to be the first half of the 15th century : one in Lord Spencer's collection bears the date of 1423, and there is reason to believe that other specimens were executed almost as late as 1450. Of the block hooka of any considerable magnitude the two most remarkable are, that generally styled, though probably not correctly, the Biblia Pauperum,' a small folio of forty leaves, each containing a picture, with a text of scripture or some other illustrative sentence under it, the first edition of which (for there were several), is supposed to have been produced between 1430 and 1450, and of this an early edition is in the King's Library of the British Museum; and the `Speculum Hutilanre Salva tionist consisting of sixty-three leaves of the same small folio size, containing in all fifty-eight pictures, with two lines of Latin rhyme under each. With regard to this last in particular, however, there has been a great deal of disputation, some denying altogether its claim to be reckoned a specimen of block-printing, in so far as the legends are concerned ; but it is now generally admitted that at least some of the legends have every appearance of having been printed from the same block with the picture, although in other cases they seem to have been subsequently inserted from moveable types. A minute examination of the cuts, uudertakcn by Mr. Ottley, has proved that the Latin edition with moveable types was undeubteclly the earliest, and dates probably about 1470. The edition in which twenty of the subjects have the inscriptions cut on the wood, while the others are from moveable types, is apparently a copy (" laid down," as engravers style it) of the original Latiu edition. Another block-book that was frequently printed, and which is noticeable as consisting wholly of text, without pictures, was the small Latin Grammar of Donatus, the common school-book of those days. These block-books are, like the Chinese books at this day, printed only on one aide of the leaf, and may have been produced in Germany.