AND ITS CONTENTS.

13

The subjects that are chosen for the drawings may be classed under figures,architecture, with masonry, carpentry, and practical geometry, and machines.

The first occupies the greatest space; for of the sixty-three plates that remain,thirty-five are wholly devoted to it, and six shared with the others, making a totalof thirty-eight plates, and leaving only twenty-five for the remaining subjects; inother words, figures take up about three-fifths of the whole. Many of them aredrawn on a scale that occupies the whole page, and they are either single or ingroups, and represent sacred personages, symbolical and moral figures, studiesfrom the antique or from nature and ordinary life, elementary figures for learners,and animals of all kinds. The persons or events to which they refer are veryrarely indicated by inscriptions, and must be left to conjecture. Architecture,which occupies a space equivalent to about sixteen plates, gives to us plans ofchurches and other buildings, mostly drawn from real ones, perspective views, ifthey may be so called, of the tower of Laon and the chapels of Rheims Cathedral,drawings of windows, of a clock-house, lectern, stall-work, &c., and elevations anddetails of one compartment of Rheims Cathedral. Three plates are exclusivelydevoted to masonry and practical geometry, about two to carpentry, and three, withthe halves of two others, to machines.

At first sight it would seem as if the subjects were mixed up in this volumeWithout method or classification, but this is not altogether true, neither is itpossible that the want of order which they exhibit is the effect of a re-binding ora rearrangement of the volume; for it will be observed that the same subjectcontinues over several pages, and that generally when another subject is takenU P, the page, or at least the leaf, at that point is shared between the two. Thusfigures occupy the first seven plates, then come two plates of machines and archi-tecture, a leaf with figures on one side and architecture on the other, a leaf witharchitecture on one side and architecture and figures on the other, two pageswith figures, one with figures and machines, two of architecture, one architectureand figures, seven of figures, one of figures and architecture, two of architecture,and so on, as the annexed table shews. If the subjects at the two ends ofthe same sheet be compared, the same kind of evidence of the original mixture ofdissimilar objects will be obtained. Rigid classification plainly never enteredinto the plan of the artist, but he went on drawing figures until he was tired, andthen began drawing architecture, and so on; or, more probably, at first assigneda few blank pages at the beginning of his book to figures, and the next few toarchitecture; and thus, when the former were filled with figures, he was com-piled to continue his figures on the pages beyond his architecture, and thus thesubjects became arranged in alternate groups in a manner which happens to every