"A creature he called to wait on his will,
Half iron, half vapour—a dread to behold—
Which evermore panted, and evermore rolled,
And uttered his words a millionfold.
Forth sprung they in air, down raining in dew,
And men fed upon them, and mighty they grew."
Leigh Hunt, Sword and Pen.
I.—JOHN GUTENBERG.
Some Dutch writers, inspired by a not unnatural feeling of patriotism, have endeavoured to claim the honour of inventing the Art of Printing for a countryman of their own, Laurence Coster of Haarlem. Their sole reliance, however, is upon the statements of one Hadrian Junius, who was born at Horn, in North Holland, in 1511. About 1575 he wrote a work, entitled "Batavia," in which the account of Coster first appeared. And, as an unimpeachable authority has remarked, almost every succeeding advocate of Coster's pretensions has taken the liberty of altering, amplifying, or contradicting the account of Junius, according as it might suit his own line of argument; but not one of them has succeeded in producing a solitary fact in confirmation of it. The accounts which are given of Coster's discovery by Junius and his successors present many contradictory features. Thus Junius says: "Walking in a neighbouring wood, as citizens are accustomed to do after dinner and on holidays, he began to cut letters of beech-bark, with which, for amusement—the letters being inverted as on a seal—he impressed short sentences on paper for the children of his son-in-law." A later writer, Scriverius, is more imaginative: "Coster," he says, "walking in the wood, picked up a small bough of a beech, or rather of an oak-tree, blown off by the wind; and after amusing himself with cutting some letters on it, wrapped it up in paper, and afterwards laid himself down to sleep. When he awoke, he perceived that the paper, by a shower of rain or some accident having got moist, had received an impression from these letters; which induced him to pursue the accidental discovery."
Not only are these accounts evidently deficient in authenticity, but it should be remarked that the earliest of them was not put before the world until Laurence Coster had been nearly a hundred and fifty years in his grave. The presumed writer of the narrative which first did justice to his memory had been also twelve years dead when his book was published. His information, or rather the information brought forward under cover of his name, was derived from an old man who, when a boy, had heard it from another old man who lived with Coster at the time of the robbery, and who had heard the account of the invention from his master. For, to explain the fact of the early appearance of typography in Germany, the Dutch writers are forced to the hypothesis that an apprentice of Coster's stole all his master's types and utensils, fleeing with them first to Amsterdam, second to Cologne, and lastly to Mentz! The whole story is too improbable to be accepted by any impartial inquirer; and the best authorities are agreed in dismissing the Dutch fiction with the contempt it deserves, and in ascribing to John Gutenberg, of Mentz, the honour to which he is justly entitled.
Of the career of Gutenberg we shall speak presently, but let us first point out that the invention of typography, like all great inventions, was no sudden conception of genius—not the birth of some singularly felicitous moment of inspiration—but the result of what may be called a gradual series of causes. Printing with movable types was the natural outcome of printing with blocks. We must go back, therefore, a few years, to examine into the origin of "block books."