equally unfortunate and unfaithful to his master—or whether he was another of the same name, I shall not trouble myself to ascertain—for I am unwilling to disturb the shades of the dead, inasmuch as they[1] must have suffered from the reproaches of conscience as long as they lived. This man, although bound by oath to [preserving the secrets of] the typographic art, when he knew himself to be perfectly skilled in the operations of type-setting, in the knowledge of type-founding, and in every other detail appertaining to the work, seized the first favorable opportunity—and he could not have found a time more favorable, for it was on the night of the anniversary of the nativity of Christ, when all, without distinction, are accustomed to assist at divine service—and flew into the closet of the types, and packed up the instruments used in making them that belonged to his master, and which had been made with his own hands, and immediately after slunk away from the house with the thief. He went first to Amsterdam, thence to Cologne, and finally regained Mentz, as it were to an altar of safety so it is said, and as if beyond all possibility of a recapture, where, having opened his office, he reaped an abundant reward from the fruits of his theft. That is to say, within the space of a year, or about 1442, it is well known that he published by the aid of the same types which Laurentius had used in Haarlem, the Doctrinal of Alexander Gallus, the most popular grammar then in use, and also the Treatises of Peter of Spain, which were his first publications.
These are the facts. Nearly all of them are from old men worthy of belief, who, each in turn, have accepted and transmitted them, as they would pass a lighted torch from hand to hand. I knew these facts long time ago, and have positive knowledge from other sources which have attested and confirmed them. I remember that Nicholas Gallius, the preceptor of my boyhood, a man of tenacious memory, and venerable with gray hairs, narrated these circumstances to me. He, when a boy, had more than once heard Cornells, an old book-binder and an under workman in the same printing office, when not an octogenarian and bowed down with years, recite all these details as he had received them from his master, embracing the inception of the enterprise, the growth and cultivation of the rude art, and other transactions connected therewith. But as often as he made mention of the theft, he involuntarily would burst into tears at the recollection of the infamy of the sequel; and then the anger of the old man- ↑ In Junius's description of the thief, there is a strange confusion of singular and plural. Beginning with the specification of one John as the thief, the story ends with an intimation that there were two thieves. This substitution of they for he is not a typographical error, nor is it a slip of the pen. It seems to have been intended to sustain the insinuation of the complicity of Fust in this theft.
