Que fuerat uobis ars prima nota latini
Est eadem nobis ipsa reperta patres.
Quamuis semotos toto canit orbe Britannos
Virgilius, placet his lingua latina tamen.
This little work was happily printed in the bounteous University of Oxford in the two hundred and ninety-seventh Olympiad from the birth of Christ.
This noble work was printed by Theodoric Rood, a German by blood, sent from Cologne, and an Englishman, Thomas Hunte, was his partner. The gods grant that they may surpass the Venetians. The art which the Frenchman Jenson taught the Venetians, the British land has learnt by its mother-wit. Cease, Venetians, from sending us the books you engrave: we are now, O Venetians, selling to others. The art which was first known to you, O Latin Fathers, has been discovered by us. Although Virgil sings of the Britons as all a world away, yet the Latin tongue delights them.
This is certainly not a truthful colophon, for we cannot believe that any foreign students would have sent to Oxford to buy the letters of the pseudo-Phalaris or any other books there printed, while the assertion that Britons learnt printing by their mother-wit accords ill with the fact that Theodoric Rood came from Cologne to practise the art on their behalf. Mr. Horatio Brown, however, perhaps presses the fifth line a little too hard when he asserts that “these verses prove that public opinion abroad assigned the priority of printing in Venice to Jenson.” John of Speier had died so early in his career, and the work of Jenson is to this day so universally recognized as the finest which was produced at Venice, that the Frenchman may fairly be said to have taught the Venetians printing, without claiming for him priority in order of time. It should, perhaps, also be noted that while Hain and Mr. Brown print the important word as docuit, Mr. Madan gives it as decuit, from which it might be possible to extract the assertion, not that he taught the Venetians the art, but that he graced them with it. It would need, however, a fifteenth-century Orbilius to do justice upon the perpetrator of such vile Latin, while e for o is an easy misprint, and docuit is confirmed by the obvious antithesis of didicit in the next line.
More important, because more detailed than any of the boasts we have yet quoted, are the claims and pleas put forward in the colophons to the edition of the commentary of Servius on Virgil, printed by Bernardo Cennini and his son Domenico, at Florence, in 1471-72. The first of these occurs at the end of the Bucolics, and is repeated, with the substitution of “Georgica” for “volumen hoc primum,” after the Georgics. The second comes at the end of the book.
(1) Ad Lectorem. Florentiae. vii Idus Nouembres. MccccLxxi. Bernardus Cennius [sic], aurifex omnium iudicio prestantissimus, et Dominicus eius F[ilius] egregiae indolis adolescens, expressis ante calibe caracteribus, ac deinde fusis literis, volumen hoc primum impresserunt. Petrus Cenninus, Bernardi eiusdem F[ilius], quanta potuit cura et diligentia emendauit ut cernis. Florentinis ingeniis nil ardui est.
(2) Ad Lectorem. Bernardinus Cenninus, aurifex omnium iudicio praestantissimus, et Dominicus eius F[ilius], optimae indolis adolescens, impresserunt. Petrus eiusdem Bernardi F[ilius] emendauit, cum antiquissimis autem multis exemplaribus contulit. In primisque illi cura fuit, ne quid alienum Seruio adscriberetur, ne quid recideretur aut deesset, quod Honorati esse peruetusta exemplaria demonstrarent. Quoniam uero plerosque iuuat manu propria suoque more Graeca interponere, eaque in antiquis codicibus perpauca sunt, et accentus quidem difficillimi imprimendo notari sunt, relinquendum ad id spatia duxit. Sed cum apud homines perfectum nihil sit, satis uideri cuique debebit, si hi libri (quod vehementer optamus) prae aliis emendati reperientur. Absolutum opus Nonis Octobribus. M. cccc Lxxii. Florentiae.