Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/202

WORKMEN AND HEROES trade in manuscripts in Paris. His travels, and his intimacy with the artists of that town, had made him acquainted with mechanical processes for working in metals, which he adapted, on his return to Mainz, to the art of printing. These new means enabled him to cast movable leaden types in a copper matrix, with greater precision than before, and thus to give great neatness to the letters. It was by this new process that the Psalter, the first book bearing a date, was printed in 1457. Soon afterward the Mainz Bible, recognized as a masterpiece of art, was produced under the direction of Gutenberg, from types founded by Peter Scaceffer's process. The tendency of the new art, which began by cheapening sacred books under the auspices of the Church alone, escaped, during the first years of its existence, the notice of the Roman court, which saw an auxiliary in what it afterward con- sidered as an opponent. " Among the number of blessings which we ought to praise God for having vouchsafed during your pontificate," says a dedication in the time of Paul II., " is this invention, which enables the poorest to procure libraries at a low price. Is it not a great glory to your Holiness, that volumes which used to cost one hun* dred pieces of gold are now to be bought for four, or even less, and that the fruits of genius, heretofore the prey of the worms and buried in dust, begin upder your reign to arise from the dead, and to multiply profusely over all the earth ? " Meanwhile, Faust the banker, and Schceffer the workman, Gutenberg's new partners, were not long in giving way, like his former partner, one Mentel or Metelin at Strasburg, to the temptation of absorbing by degrees Gutenberg's glory, the most tempting of all possessions, because of its immortality. Like many others, they hoped to deceive posterity, if not their own contemporaries. After recognizing, in the Epistle Dedicatory prefixed to the German translation of Livy, printed by Hans Schoeffer, and addressed to the Emperor Maximilian, "that the art of printing was invented at Mainz by that sublime mechanician Hans von Gutenberg," they forgot this confession, and seven years later assumed Io themselves all the merit and honor of the discovery. A short time afterward, the Emperor Maximilian, erecting the printers and compositors into a species of intellectual priesthood, relieved them by the nobil- ity of their occupation from all degradation of rank. He ennobled the art and the artists together ; he authorized them to wear robes embroidered with gold and silver, which nobles only had a right to wear, and gave them for armorial bearings an eagle with his wings spread over a globe, a symbol of the flight of written thoughts, and of its conquest of the world. But Gutenberg was no longer upon earth to enjoy the possession of that in- tellectual world, religious and political, of which he had only had a glimpse, like Moses, in the vision of his dream in the monastery of St. Arbogast. Despoiled by his partners of his property and of his fame ; expelled again, and for the last time, from his country by poverty, his only consolation being that he was followed by his wife, who remained faithful through all his troubles ; deprived by death of all his children ; advanced in years, without bread, and soon afterward, by his