Meerman and his followers vainly try to evade the force of this fatal silence; all their learning and ingenuity are brought to bear, but without effect; for if, as they maintain, the historians of that time considered the attempts made at Haarlem so crude and imperfect, as not to be worthy their notice, what is to be made of the statement of Junius, that the invention attracted notice; that the works printed were publicly sold, and the business increased so much, that numerous workmen and assistants had to be engaged? The number of works said by Koning and others to have issued from the Coster press, indicates anything but a crude and imperfect state of the art; and if those works had been printed by the sacristan of the great Church of Haarlem, the Prior of the Carmelites, living in the city at the same time, must have known of their existence. How then is his silence to be accounted for?
The only rational conclusion to which one can arrive, is, that the tradition, which, after the growth of a hundred years was moulded into historic narrative by Junius, had neither existence nor foundation in the days of Prior Gerbrant. As an aid to history, in the elucidation of facts otherwise obscure, tradition is a valuable auxiliary; but as opposed to history and well known facts, there is no more unreliable source of information. Every one is aware how witnesses of the same occurrence will differ in their statements of the particulars of what they saw; and all who have taken the pains to unravel old traditions well know how wholly unlike their origin they ultimately and all but invariably prove to be. There is no reason for supposing that the traditional account of the origin of printing in Haarlem is an exception to the rule. The age was one prone to the invention of legends; and in the early days of printing in that city, and after Ulric Zell had published his account at Cologne, and attributed to Gutenberg the taking of the idea from the Donatuses first printed in Holland, it is by no means unlikely that an old printer, or an old book-binder, in Haarlem, who had when a boy seen a specimen of a Biblia Pauperum or a Donatus, in the hands of the Sacristan of the Church, would say, first, that he had seen the proof that printing originated in Holland, there, in that city; then, stretching a point, that printing originated there; others, repeating this, would assert that the proof that such was the fact existed; that it had been seen in the hands of the Coster; that the Coster printed it; that there was the house he lived in; that it was a shame the Germans, who stole the idea of the separable types from the Dutch, should get all the credit; that they had robbed Coster of his fame; nay robbed him of his types; that it must have been one of the Johns of Mentz who was the thief; and so on, varying and amplifying the tale, until the time of Junius, who finding the poem of Arnold de Bergel imparting a fresh halo of glory to Mentz and her three first printers, adopted and embellished the tradition, and borrowing certain ideas from Virgil as well as from Bergel, gave in his Batavia an account of the first conception and ultimate realization of the idea, which should stand as a rival to the account given in the Encomion Chalcographiæ.
The documents upon which the Haarlemese mainly rely, prove of themselves that the tradition grew within the space of a few years almost as rapidly as the pillar-like flower-stalk of the gigantic American aloe, and effloresced as abundantly in the narrative of Junius—the prolific progenitor of a host of subsequent writers:—for first, (in say 1555,) the art only “became the companion of a certain stranger;”[101]—then (1561) it “was carried to Mentz by an unfaithful servant;”[102]—next, (1567) “the author of the invention happening to die before the art was brought to perfection and had acquired repute, his servant they say went to reside at Mentz:”[103]—finally, (1568) the foresworn workman, the thief John, while his master was still alive ... seizes the collection of types, and all the implements his master had got together ... marches off to Amsterdam, thence to Cologne, and at last settled at Mentz;—and Coster, lamenting his losses, tells his woes to the little boy Cornelis, who used to help the book-binder; and Cornelis is so powerfully affected by the tale, that seventy-two years after, whenever he was asked to repeat it, he would fall into passionate weepings, and curse and execrate the miscreant John, and vow nothing would please him more, were he but alive, than with his own hands to hang him outright.[104] These are the bases upon which are built “the accumulated and still accumulating evidence in favour of Coster,”—the “vast mass of unanswerable evidence in his favour,”—in presence of which “the advocates of Gutenberg’s claim to priority are slow to give way;” and for which slowness they are accused of “closing both eyes and ears to testimony of every kind, refusing to acknowledge that there is the slightest ground for the claims of Holland as against the, asserted, overwhelming evidence in favour of Germany.”[105] With such writers, the array of facts on the Gutenberg side of the question goes for naught. Pinning their faith to Junius they
... “with power (their power was great)
Hovering upon the waters what they met
Solid or slimy, as in raging sea
Toss’d up and down, together crowded drove
From each side shoaling.”
Labouring thus, they from Meerman to Van Meurs[106]
... “following his track