Fast locked up in sleep,
where the idea conveyed is the same.
The ‘Forme’ worked off and the metal chase removed, leaving the pages ‘naked’, affords the Poet the following simile, which although not carrying to the popular ear any typographical meaning, was doubtless suggested by Shakspere’s former experience of the workshop:
And he but naked though locked up in steel.
2 Henry VI, iii, 2.
The primary idea of ‘locking up’ had, doubtless, reference to ‘armour’; the secondary to printing, as shown by the use of the word ‘naked’.
The forme then went to the Press-room, where considerable ingenuity was required to make ‘register’; that is, to print one side so exactly upon the other, that when the sheet was held up to the light the lines on each side would exactly back one another. The accuracy of judgment required for this is thus glanced at:
Eno. But let the world rank me in register
A master-leaver and a fugitive.
Antony and Cleopatra, iv, 9.
When the green-eyed Othello takes his wife’s hand and exclaims:
Here’s a young and sweating devil,
Othello, iii, 4,
we fail at first to catch the idea of the Poet in calling a hand a ‘devil’; but take the word as synonymous with ‘messenger’, and we see at once how the moist plump palm of Desdemona suggested to the intensely jealous husband the idea of its having been the lascivious messenger of her impure desires. In this sense of ‘messenger’, the word ‘devil’ has a special fitness; for it is, and always has been among Printers, and Printers only, another word for ‘errand-boy’. In olden times, when speed was required, a boy stood at the off-side of the press, and as soon as the frisket was raised, whipped the printed sheet off the tympan. When not at work, he ran on messages between printer and author, who, on account of his inky defilement, dubbed him ‘devil’. All Printers’ boys go now by the same name: