THE SAME WORK. Printed by the Same.  Folio.  The poetry is in double columns, and the cuts are coloured.  I apprehend this copy to be much cropt.  It is UPON VELLUM:  rather tawny, but upon the whole exceedingly sound and desirable.

L’ART DE BIEN MOURIR. Printed for Verard. Without Date.  Folio.  A fragment only of the Work.  In large gothic type; double columns:  cuts coloured.  There are two cuts of demons torturing people in a cauldron, such as may be seen in the second volume of my Typographical Antiquities.[74] Some of these cuts, in turn, may be taken from the older ones in block books.  The present copy is UPON VELLUM, rather tawny:  but it is large and sound.  In calf binding.

PARABOLES [de] MAISTRE ALAIN [De Lille] Printed by Verard, 1492.  Folio.  A magnificent volume, for size and condition.  It is printed in Verard’s large type, in long lines.  The illuminations are highly coloured.  This copy is UPON VELLUM.[75]

Suppose, now, I throw in a little variety from the preceding, by the mention of a rare Italian book or two?  Let me place before you a choice copy of the

MONTE SANCTO DI DIO. Printed in 1477.  Folio.  This, you know, is the volume about which the collectors of early copper-plate engraving are never thoroughly happy until they possess a perfect copy of it:  perhaps a copy of a more covetable description than that which is now before me.  There is a duplicate of the first cut:  of which one impression is faint, and miserably coloured, and the other is so much cut away to the left, as to deprive the man, looking up, of his left arm.  There is an exceedingly well executed duplicate of the large Christ, drawn with a pen.  In the genuine print there is too much of the burr.  The impression of the Devil eating human beings, within the lake of fire, is a good bold one.  This copy is bound in red morocco, but in a flaunting style of ornament.

LA SFORZIADA. Printed in 1480.  Folio.  It is just possible you may not have forgotten the description of a copy of this work—­like the present, struck off UPON VELLUM—­which appears in the Bibliographical Decameron.[76] That copy, you may remember, adorns the choice collection of our friend George Hibbert, Esq.[77] The book before me is doubtless a most exquisite one; and the copy is of large dimensions.  The illuminated first page very strongly resembles that in the copy just mentioned.  The portraits appear to be the same:  but the Cardinal is differently habited, and his phisiognomical expression is less characteristic here than in the same portrait in Mr. Hibbert’s copy.  The head of Duke Sforza, his brother, seems to be about the same.