Read Ebook: The Great Events by Famous Historians Volume 08 The Later Renaissance: from Gutenberg to the Reformation by Horne Charles F Charles Francis Editor Johnson Rossiter Editor Rudd John LL D Editor

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"Julius Proculus will this day have an auction of his superfluous goods, to pay his debts."

I could cite a great many other evidences of early writing on stone or brass, but will merely recommend you to see the Rosetta inscription, which is conspicuously placed in the British Museum. It is this very interesting stone which, being partly Greek and partly Egyptian, has enabled us to decipher so many Egyptian monuments.

Wooden table-books, as we learn from Chaucer, were used in England as late as the fifteenth century. When epistles were written upon tables of wood they were usually tied together with cord, the seal being put upon the knot. Some of the table-books must have been large and heavy, for in Plautus a schoolboy seven years old is represented as breaking his master's head with his table-book.

Before I leave this stage of the subject, I will mention the way in which the Roman youth were taught writing. Quintilian tells us that they were made to write through perforated tablets, so as to draw the stylus through a kind of furrow; and we learn from Procopius that a similar contrivance was used by the emperor Justinian for signing his name. Such a tablet would now be called a stencil-plate, and is what to the present day is found the most rapid and convenient mode of marking goods, only that a brush is used instead of an iron pen or style.

Papyrus is a very durable substance, made of the innermost pellicles of the stalk, glued together transversely, with the glutinous water of the Nile. It was for many centuries the great staple of Egypt, and was exported in large quantities to almost every part of Europe and Asia, but never, it would appear, to England or Germany. After the seventh century its use was gradually superseded by the introduction of parchment; and before the end of the twelfth century it had gone generally out of use. From "papyrus" the name of "paper," which, with slight variations, is common to many languages, is no doubt derived.

Parchment and vellum--which are made from the skin of animals, the former from sheep or goat, the latter from calf, both prepared with lime--were in use at a very early period, long before their accredited introduction. It has been by some supposed that Eumenes, King of Pergamus, who lived about B.C. 190, was the inventor of parchment; but it was known much earlier, as may be seen by several references to it in the Bible . It is, however, very probable that it may have been brought to perfection at Pergamus, as it was one of the principal articles of commerce of that kingdom.

We now come to the great period of writing-papers made from cotton and linen rags, as used at the present day, and which from the first were so perfect that they have since undergone no material improvement. Cotton-paper was an Eastern invention, probably introduced in the ninth century, although not generally used in Europe till about the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Greek manuscripts are found upon it of the earlier period, and Italian manuscripts of the later. It seems to have prevailed at particular periods, in particular countries, according to the facilities for procuring it, as it now does almost exclusively in America. Linen paper, the most valuable and important of all the bases available for writing or printing, is likewise supposed to have been introduced into Europe from the East, early in the thirteenth century, although not in general use till the fourteenth.

Before the end of the fourteenth century, paper-mills had been established in many parts of Europe, first in Spain, and then successively in Italy, Germany, Holland, and France. They seem to have come late into England, for Caxton printed all his books on paper imported from the Low Countries; and it was not till Winkin de Worde succeeded him, in 1495, that paper was manufactured in England. The Chinese are supposed to have used it for centuries before, and appear to have the best title to be considered the inventors of both cotton and linen paper.

Paper may be made of many other materials, such as hay, straw, nettles, flax, grasses, parsnips, turnips, colewort leaves, wood-shavings, indeed of anything fibrous; but as the invention of printing is not concerned in them, I see no occasion to consider their merits.

Before I pass from paper, it may not be irrelevant to say a word or two on the names by which we distinguish the sorts and sizes. The term "post-paper" is derived from the ancient water-mark, which was a post-horn, and not from its suitableness to transport by post, as many suppose. The original watermark of a fool's cap gave the name to that paper, which it still retains, although the fool's cap was afterward changed to a cap of liberty, and has since undergone other changes. The smaller size, called "pot-paper," took its name from having at first been marked with a flagon or pot. Demy-paper, on which octavo books are usually printed, is so called from being originally a "demi" or half-sized paper; the term is now, however, equally applied to hard or writing papers. Hand-cap, which is a coarse paper used for packing, bore the water-mark of an open hand.

The next, and not the least important, ingredient in writing and printing is ink. Staining and coloring matters were well known to the ancients at a very early period, witness the lustrous pigments on Etruscan vases more than two thousand years ago; and inks are often mentioned in the Bible. Gold, silver, red, blue, and green inks were thoroughly understood in the Middle Ages, and perhaps earlier; and the black writing-ink of the seventh down to the tenth century, as seen in our manuscripts, was in such perfection that it has retained its lustre better than some of later ages. Printing-ink, by the time it began to be currently used for book-printing in the fifteenth century, had attained a perfection which has never been surpassed, and indeed scarcely equalled.

Paper and ink being at their highest point, we will now consider the advances which had in the mean time been made in engraving and type or letter cutting. It will be seen that the material elements of printing were by degrees converging to a culminating point. The evidences of engraving, both in relief and intaglio, are of very ancient date. I need hardly remind you of the exquisite workmanship on coins, cameos, and seals, many centuries before the Christian era, to illustrate the high state of cultivation at which the arts must then have arrived. The art of casting and chasing in bronze was extensively practised in the twelfth century, and I have seen a specimen with letters so cut in relief that they might be separated to form movable type. The goldsmiths were certainly among the greatest artists of the early ages, and were competent to execute forms or moulds of any kind to perfection.

In the British Museum is a brass signet stamp, more than two thousand years old, on which two lines of letters are very neatly engraved in relief, in the reversed order necessary for printing; and as the interstices are cut away very deeply and roughly, there is little doubt but that this stamp was used with ink on papyrus, parchment, or linen, for paper was not then known. Indeed, the experiment of taking impressions from it in printing-ink has been tried, and found to answer perfectly. A large surface so engraved would at once have given to the world an equivalent to what is now regarded as the most advanced state of the art of printing; that is, a stereotype plate. Vergil mentions brands for marking cattle with their owner's name; probably this kind of brass stamp, but larger.

I could cite many more examples of ancient engraving which would yield impressions on paper, either by pressure or friction. But our business is with printing rather than engraving; I will, therefore, go back to the subject, and cite a very early and interesting example of stamping engraved letters on clay. I mean the Babylonian bricks, supposed to be four thousand years old, mostly sun-baked, but some apparently kiln-burnt almost to vitrification. Of these there are now many examples in England, added to our stores by the indefatigable researches of Layard, Rawlinson, and others. These bricks, which are about a foot square and three inches thick, are on one side covered with hieroglyphics, evidently impressed with a stamp, just as letters are now stamped on official papers.

Another evidence of the same kind, and of about the same age, is the famous Babylonian cylinder found in the ruins of Persepolis, and now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is about seven inches high, barrel-shaped, and covered with inscriptions in the cuneiform character, disposed in vertical lines, and affording a positive example of an indented surface produced by mechanical impression. Such cylinders are supposed to have been memorials of matters of national or family importance, and were in early ages, as we know by tradition, very numerous. Stamped or printed blocks of lead, bearing the names of Roman authorities, are to be found in the British Museum.

Having said enough, I think, of the ancients' knowledge of type-forms and printing materials, I pass on to the recognized establishments of the art in the fifteenth century; for, whatever knowledge the ancients had of printing, it would appear to have yielded no immediate fruits to posterity.

But before I proceed to modern times, I am bound to note that the Chinese, who seem to have been many centuries in advance of Europe in most of the industral arts, are supposed to have practised block-printing, just as they do now, more than a thousand years ago. Nor does the complicated nature of their written language, which consists of more than one hundred thousand word-signs, admit of any readier mode. But they print, or rather rub off, impressions with such speed--seven hundred sheets per hour--that, until the introduction of steam, they far outstripped Europeans. Gibbon, it will be remembered, regrets that the emperor Justinian, who lived in the sixth century, did not introduce the art of printing from the Chinese, instead of their silk manufacture.

There is a vague tradition, depending entirely on the assertion of a writer named Papillon, not a very reliable authority, which would give the invention of wood-cut-printing to Venice, and at a very early period. He asserts that he once saw a set of eight prints, depicting the deeds of Alexander the Great, each described in verse, which were engraved in relief, and printed by a brother and sister named Cunio, at Ravenna, in 1285. But though the assertion is accredited by Mr. Ottley, it is generally disbelieved.

There is reason to suppose that playing-cards, from wooden blocks, were produced at Venice long before the block-books, even as early as 1250; but there is no positive evidence that they were printed; and some insist that they were produced either by friction or stencil-plates. It seems, however, by no means unlikely that cards, which were in most extensive use in the Middle Ages, should, for the sake of cheapness, have been printed quite as early, if not earlier, than even figures of saints; and the same artists are presumed to have produced both.

Koster, as he was one day walking in a wood adjoining the city, about the year 1420, cut some letters on the bark of a beech tree, from which he took impressions on paper for the amusement of his brother-in-law's children. The idea then struck him of enlarging their application; and, being a man of an ingenious turn, he invented a thicker and more tenacious ink than was in common use, which blotted, and began to print figures from wooden tablets or blocks, to which he added several lines of letters, first solid, and then separate or movable. These wooden types are said to have been fastened together with string.

One thing seems pretty clear, which is, that, whether or not Koster was the printer, the first block-books were produced somewhere in Holland, as several are in Dutch, a language seldom, if ever, printed out of its own country. They were generally printed in light-brown ink, like a sepia drawing, which, I think, was adopted with a view to their being colored--a condition in which we find the greater part of them. When these prints were colored they presented very much the appearance of the Low Country stained-glass windows.

The pretensions of Haarlem and Koster have for more than a century been a matter of fierce controversy; and there have been upward of one hundred and fifty volumes written for or against, without any approach to a satisfactory decision. This one thing is certain, that, whether or not we owe the first idea of movable type to Laurence Koster or to Haarlem, we do not owe to the period any very marked use of it; that was reserved for a later day.

What has hitherto been advanced proves only that mankind had walked for many centuries on the borders of the two great inventions, chalcography and typography, without having fully and practically discovered either of them.

The new partnership immediately commenced operations, hired a house called Zumjungen, and took into their employ Peter Schoeffer, who had been Faust's apprentice, as their assistant. Faust is supposed to have employed himself in cutting the type, which is an extremely slow process, till Peter Schoeffer, afterward his son-in-law, suggested an improved mode of casting it in copper matrices struck by steel punches, pretty much in the same manner as was till recently practised throughout Europe. The firm had for some time previously adopted a method of casting type in moulds of plaster, which was a tedious process, as every letter required a new mould.

These precious volumes, as splendid as they are wonderful, have excited the admiration of all beholders. The sharpness and elegant uniformity of the type, the lustre of the ink, and the purity of the paper leave that first great monument of the typographic art unsurpassed by any subsequent effort; nor could it be exceeded with all the appliances of the present day.

"It is a striking circumstance," says Mr. Hallam, "that the high-minded inventors of this great art tried, at the very outset, so bold a flight as the printing of an entire Bible, and executed it with astonishing success. It was Minerva leaping on earth in her divine strength and radiant armor, ready, at the moment of her nativity, to subdue and destroy her enemies."

There is a curious story current about this Bible, which, as it is connected with a popular fiction, I will venture to repeat. It is that Faust went to Paris with some of his Bibles for sale, one of which, printed on vellum and richly illuminated, he sold to the King for seven hundred and fifty crowns, and another to the Archbishop of Paris for three hundred crowns, and to the poorer clergy and the laity copies on paper as low as fifty crowns, and even less. Faust does not appear to have disclosed the secret of how they were produced, and probably let it be supposed that they were manuscript; for the aim of the first printers was to make their books equal in beauty to the finest manuscripts, and as far as possible undistinguishable from them, to which end the large capitals and decorations were filled in by hand.

The Archbishop, proud of his purchase, showed it to the King, who, comparing it with his own, found with surprise that they tallied so exactly in every respect, excepting the illuminated ornaments, as convinced them that they were produced by some other art than transcription; and on further inquiry they found that Faust had sold a considerable number exactly similar. Orders, therefore, were given without delay to apprehend and prosecute him as a practitioner of the black art in multiplying Holy Writ by aid of the devil. Hence arose the popular fiction of the Devil and Dr. Faustus, which, under different phases, has found its way into every country in Europe, and probably gave rise to Goethe's celebrated drama.

At this critical period, when the art was reaching its zenith, the operations of the Mainz printers were suddenly brought to a standstill by the siege and capture of the city in 1462. The occasion of this was a fierce dispute between the Pope and the people as to who had the right of appointment to the archbishopric, lately become vacant. The original hive of workmen dispersed to other states, and by degrees the mysteries of the art became spread over the civilized world. Such, indeed, was the fame printing had acquired, and its manifest importance, that every crowned head sought to introduce it into his kingdom, and welcomed the fugitives. Within a few years of this period the art had been carried by the scattered German workmen into Italy, France, Spain, and Switzerland; and before the close of the fifteenth century it was practised in more than two hundred twenty different places.

One of the earliest of the Italian books, and, to use the words of Dr. Dibdin, perhaps the most notorious volume in existence, was the celebrated Boccaccio, printed at Venice by Valdarfer in 1471. This book deserves particular mention, because of an extraordinary contest which once took place for its possession between two wealthy bibliomaniacs. It was a small black-letter folio, in faded yellow morocco, and supposed to be unique. Its history is this: In the early part of the eighteenth century it had come accidentally into the possession of a London bookseller, who successively offered it to Harley, Earl of Oxford, and to Lord Sunderland; then the two principal collectors, for one hundred guineas; but both were staggered at the price and higgled about the purchase. An ancestor of the late Duke of Roxburghe, whom nobody dreamed of as a collector, hearing of the book, secured it, and then invited the two noblemen to dinner, with the view of parading his trophy. In due course he led the conversation to the book, and, after letting them expatiate on its rarity, told them he thought he had a copy in his bookcase, which they emphatically declared to be impossible, and challenged him to produce it. On producing the book, about the purchase of which they had only been temporizing, they were not a little chagrined.

This same copy made its appearance again, half a century later, at the Duke of Roxburghe's sale in 1812, a time when bibliomania was at its height. Loud notes of preparation foretold that it would sell for a considerable sum; five hundred and even one thousand guineas were guessed, as it was known that Lord Spencer, the Duke of Devonshire, and the Marquis of Blandford were all bent on its possession, but nobody anticipated the extravagant sum it was to realize. After a very spirited competition, it was knocked down to the Marquis of Blandford for two thousand sixty pounds. This book was resold at the Marquis of Blandford's sale, in 1819, for eight hundred seventy-five guineas, and passed to Lord Spencer, in whose extraordinary library it now reposes.

Before the commencement of the sixteenth century, that is, within forty or fifty years of the invention of printing with movable type, upward of twenty thousand volumes had issued from at least a thousand different presses. All the principal Latin classics, many of the Greek, and upward of two hundred fifty editions of the Bible, or parts of the Bible, had appeared.

The sixteenth century opened with another invention in type, the Italic, which was beautifully exemplified in a pocket edition of Vergil, the first of a portable series of classical works commenced in 1501 at Venice by the celebrated Aldus Manutius, who, after some years of preparation, had entered actively on his career as a printer in 1494, and deservedly ranks as one of the best scholars of any age.

Among many others immortalized by their successful contributions to the great cause we must not forget the Plantins, whose memories are still so cherished at Antwerp that their printing establishment remains to this day untouched, just as it was left two centuries ago, with all the freshness of a chamber in Pompeii, the type and chases of their famous Polyglot lying about, as if the workmen had but just left the office.

William Caxton, by common consent, is the introducer of the art of printing into England. He was born about 1422, in Kent, and received what was then thought a liberal education. His father must have been in respectable circumstances, as there was at that time a law in full force prohibiting any youth from being apprenticed to trade whose parent was not possessed of a certain rental in land. In his eighteenth year Caxton was apprenticed to Robert Large, an eminent London mercer, who in 1430 was sheriff and in 1439 Lord Mayor of London. At his death, in 1441, he bequeathed Caxton a legacy of twenty marks--a large sum in those days--and an honorable testimony to his fidelity and integrity. Soon after this the Mercers' Company appointed him their agent in the Low Countries, in which employment he spent twenty-three years.

The location of these stationers was in the neighborhood of St. Paul's Cathedral, whence arose the names Paternoster Row, Creed Lane, Amen Corner, and Ave Maria Lane. Manuscripts of a higher order, that is, in the form of books, were mostly supplied by the monks, and were scarcely accessible to any but the wealthy, from their extreme cost. Thus, a Chaucer, which may now be bought for a few shillings, then cost more than a hundred pounds; and we read of two hundred sheep and ten quarters of wheat being given for a volume of homilies.

Minstrels, instead of books, were in early times the principal medium of communication between authors and the public; they wandered up and down the country, chanting, singing, or reciting, according to the taste of their customers, and had certain privileges of entertainment in the halls of the nobility.

It may be wondered that Caxton, like many of the foreign printers, did not begin with, or at least some time during his career print, the Scriptures, especially as Wycliffe's translation had already been made. But there were good reasons. Religious persecution ran high, and the clergy were extremely jealous of the propagation of the Scriptures among the people. Knighton had denounced the reading of the Bible, lamenting lest this jewel of the Church, hitherto the exclusive property of the clergy and divines, should be made common to the laity; and Archbishop Arundel had issued an enactment that no part of the Scriptures in English should be read, either in public or private, or be thereafter translated, under pain of the greater excommunication. The Star Chamber, too, was big with terrors. A little later, Erasmus' edition of the New Testament was forbidden at Cambridge; and in the county of Surrey the Vicar of Croydon said from the pulpit, "We must root out printing, or printing will root out us."

Winkin de Worde, who had come in his youth with Caxton to England and continued with him in the superintendence of his office to the day of his death, succeeded to the business, and conducted it with great spirit for the next forty years. He began by entirely remodelling his fonts of Gothic type, and introduced both Roman and Italic; became his own founder, instead of importing type from the Low Countries; promoted the manufacture of paper in this country; and such was his activity that he printed the extraordinary number of four hundred eight different works. He deserves, perhaps, more praise than he has ever received for the important part he played in establishing and advancing the art in England.

But no one of our early printers deserves more grateful remembrance than Richard Grafton, who, in 1537, was the first publisher of the Bible in England. I say in England, because the first Bible, known as Coverdale's, and several editions of the Testament, translated by Tyndale, had been previously printed abroad in secrecy. Grafton's first edition of the Bible was a reprint of Coverdale and Tyndale's translation, with slight alterations, by one who assumed the name of Thomas Matthew, but whose real name was John Rogers, then Prebendary of St. Paul's, and afterward burned as a heretic in Smithfield. Even this was printed secretly abroad, nobody yet knows where, and did not have Grafton's name attached to it till the King had granted him a license under the privy seal. Though this year, 1537, has by the annalists of the Bible been called the first year of triumph, on account of the King's license, yet Bibles were still apt to be dangerous things to all concerned; and what was permitted one day was not unlikely, by a change in religion or policy, to be interdicted the next with severe visitations.

Grafton, therefore, must have been a bold man to face the danger. Thus, in 1538, when a new edition of the Bible, commonly called the "Great Bible," afterward published in 1539, was secretly printing in Paris at the instance of Lord Cromwell, under the superintendence of Grafton, Whitchurch, and Coverdale, the French inquisitors of the faith interfered, charging them with heresy, and they were fortunate in making their escape to England.

Shortly after the death of Caxton's patron, Lord Cromwell, Grafton was imprisoned for the double offence of printing Matthew's Bible and the Great Bible, notwithstanding the King's license; and though after a while released, he was again imprisoned in the reign of Philip and Mary on account of his Protestant principles; and, after all his services to religion and literature, died in poverty in 1572.

Printing was now spreading all over England. It had already begun at Oxford in 1478--some say earlier--at Cambridge soon after, although the first dated work is 1521; at St. Albans in 1480; York in 1509; and other places by degrees.

Printing did not reach Scotland till 1507, and then but imperfectly, and Ireland not till 1551, owing, it is said, to the jealousy with which it was regarded by the priesthood.

But the time had not come; for without a very large demand, such as could not exist in those days, stereotyping would be of no advantage. Books which sell by hundreds of thousands, and are constantly reprinting, such as Bibles, prayer-books, school-books, Shakespeares, Bunyans, Robinson Crusoes, Uncle Toms, and very popular authors and editions, will pay for stereotyping; but for small numbers it is a loss. After the invention had been neglected long enough to be forgotten, Earl Stanhope, who had for several years devoted himself earnestly to the subject, and made many experiments, resuscitated it, in a very perfect manner, in 1803; and his printer, Mr. Wilson, sold the secret to both universities and to most of the leading printers. To the art of stereotyping the public is mainly indebted for cheap literature, for when the plates are once produced the chief expense is disposed of.

JOHN HUNYADY REPULSES THE TURKS

A.D. 1440-1456

ARMINIUS VAMB?RY

From the time when the Turks took Gallipoli and secured their first dominion in Europe, the Ottoman power on that side of the Hellespont was gradually increased. In 1360 Amurath I crossed from Asia Minor, ravaged an extensive district, and took Adrianople, which he made the first seat of his royalty and the first shrine of Mahometanism in Europe. He next turned toward Bulgaria and Servia, where in the warlike Slavonic tribes he found far stronger foes than the Greek victims of earlier Turkish conquests.

Bajazet I, the son and successor of Amurath, still further extended the Turkish conquests. Under Bajazet's son, Mahomet I , comparative peace prevailed; but his son, Amurath II, rekindled the flames of war. A strong combination, including, with other peoples, the Hungarians and Poles, was made against him. In the struggle that followed, and which for a time promised the complete expulsion of the Turks from Europe, the great leader was the Hungarian, John Hunyady, born in 1388. According to some writers, he was a Wallach and the son of a common soldier. Creasy calls him "the illegitimate son of Sigismund, King of Hungary, and the fair Elizabeth Morsiney." With him appeared a new spirit, such as the Ottomans up to that time could not have expected to encounter in that part of Europe. In Vamb?ry's narrative we have the authority of Hungary's greatest historian for the leading events in the life of her greatest hero.

In Europe a new power pulsating with youthful life had arrived from somewhere in the interior of Asia with the intention of conquering the world. This power was the Turk--not merely a single nation, but a whole group of peoples clustered round a nation, inspired by one single idea which urged them ever forward--"There is no god but God, and Mahomet is the apostle of God."

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