growing disbelief, nothing was written for the people which can now be considered as of importance. We look in vain over the earlier block-books for a copy, in any language that the common people could read, of a book containing appropriate selections from the Scriptures. The Lord's Prayer was published but once, published in Latin, and strangely perverted from its true purpose. The Ten Commandments, in block-book form, were printed in German, but not before the last quarter of the sixteenth century. We find no selections from the Psalms or Evangelists. The stories of the Bible, always with a Latin text, were obviously prepared, not to teach lessons of piety to the people, but to instruct the priests in the mysteries of dogmatic theology. All are orthodox: there is no block-book that has the slightest taint of heresy.
It does not appear that any of these block-books were made by monks. The block-printers of a later period were laymen, and men of no note, and it seems probable that the earlier books, without names, places or dates, were also made by laymen, by the printers of cards and images. It is possible that they were made at the instance, and perhaps under the direction, of the ecclesiastics. But we find no evidences that they were printed in monasteries; the lazy habits and coarse tastes of the monks, and their general avoidance of every form of mechanical labor as beneath their sacred calling, make this conjecture inadmissible.[1]
The literary merit of the block-books was small, and their shabby mechanical execution made them contemptible. To readers accustomed to handle great books of tinted vellum, admirably written in letters that are yet as sharp and legible as modern types, these miserable little pamphlets on dingy paper, and with muddy letters, scarcely deserved the name of books. By the educated readers of the fifteenth century they
- ↑ The Brotherhood of the Life-in-Common may, perhaps, be regarded as an exception. Madden in his Lettres d'un bibliographe has shown that this fraternity were much interested in the production of books, and that they had a printing office in a monastery at Cologne; but he has not yet made it appear that they did the manual labor.
