The Story of Liberty. Charles Carleton Coffin
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He never saw a more perfect book. The letters are even. What a steady hand the writer must ha\e had I How clear and distinct — not a blot, not an error, anywhere! It must have taken the writer a lifetime to write it. He pays the price. Now he will have something to show his friends which will astonish them. The archbishop calls upon the king.
"I have something to show you — the most magnificent book in the world," says the king.
"Indeed!" The archbishop is thinking of his own book.
"Yes; a copy of the Bible. It is a marvel. The letters are so even that you cannot discover a shade of difference."
"I have a splendid copy, and if yours is any more beautiful than mine, I should like to see it."
"Here is mine. Just look at it;" and the king shows his copy.
The archbishop turns the leaves. "This is remarkable. I don't see but that it is exactly like mine." The pages are the same, the letters the same. Can one man have written both? Impossible. Yet they are alike. There is not a particle of difference between them. "How long have yon had this? the archbishop asks.
"I bought it the other day of a man who came to the palace,"
"Singular! I bought mine of a man who came to my palace."
Neither the king nor the archbishop knows what to think of it. They place the two Bibles side by side, and find them precisely alike. There are the same number of pages; each page begins with the same word; there is not a shadow of variation. Wonderful 1 But the archbishop, in a few days, is still more perplexed. He discovers that some of the rich citizens of Paris have copies of Bibles exactly like the king's and his own. More: lie discovers that copies are for sale here and there.
"Where did you get them?"
"We bought them of a man who came along."
"Who was he?"
"We don't know."
"This is the work of the devil."
The archbishop can arrive at no other conclusion. The Bible is a dangerous book. None but the priests should be permitted to read it. But here is the Evil One selling it everywhere; or, if not himself in person, some man has sold himself to Satan for that purpose. He soon discovers that it is Doctor John Faust, of Strasburg.
"You have sold yourself to the Evil One, and must be burned to death."
Till this moment the great invention has been a secret; but Doctor Faust must divulge it, or be burned. He shows the archbishop how the Bibles are printed; and John Guttenberg has printed so many of them that the price has been reduced one-half. The archbishop, the king, and everybody else is astonished. So Faust saves his life; but the idea of hie selling himself to the devil has gone into story and song. It was the translation of the Bible into English by Doctor Wicklif that gave the first uplift to liberty; and, singularly enough, the Bible was the first book printed by Guttenberg.
Laurence Coster, when he cut the letters of the alphabet in wooden blocks and tied them into words, had no conception as to what would come of it; but the idea was like the bursting-forth of a fountain in a desert. The stream that issued from it has refreshed all the earth. With the setting-up of the printing-press began the diffusion of knowledge. Knowledge leads to liberty. Men begin to comprehend that they have natural rights, which other men — nobles, barons, kings, emperors, bishops, archbishops, and popes — are bound to respect.
One day William Caxton, a merchant of London, comes over to Holland to buy cloth. He sees some of the new books, and goes into a printing-office to see how they are made. He is greatly interested, buys some of the types, and sets up a printing-press in London, in a chapel in Westminster Abbey. Quite likely the printer's workmen do now have a very high regard for the monks and friars that swarm around Westminster, for if there is a blot on the page, they call it a "monk;" and if there is a blank, they call it a "friar." And the boy who brings the ink up from the cellar, and gets his face and hands black from handling it, they call the "devil" — words which are in use to-day in printing-offices.
The first book printed in England was entitled "The Game of Chess," in 1474. The type used was very coarse. Printers then took great delight in having large illuminated capital letters at the beginning of a book or chapter. They were printed in blue, green, and gold, and made the page very beautiful. Caxton printed a Bible, which he presented to the king.
The setting-up of the printing-press soon put an end to all the writing in the cloisters of the monasteries. The monks lay aside their pens. The printing-press turns out thousands of copies of a book almost while they are sharpening their pens and getting their parchment ready. People begin to read, and from reading comes thinking, and from thinking comes something else.
Four hundred and fifty years have passed since Laurence Coster carved the names of his children in the bark of the trees in the gardens of Haerlem — since John Guttenberg printed his first hook in that out-of-the-way chamber; but through all the years that discovery of using types to express ideas has been, like the flowing of a river, widening and deepening. Through the energizing influence of the printing-press, emperors, kings, and despots have seen their power gradually waning, and the people becoming their masters.
CHAPTER V
THE MEN WHO ASK QUESTIONS
ON an evening in October, six gentlemen and a servant ride out from the old city of Saragossa, in Spain, taking a road which leads westward. They are starting at this hour of the day for Valladolid; they do not expect, however, to reach it at once, for it is two hundred miles distant. They do not care to have everybody know that they are making the journey, for there are bands of armed men on the lookout for them; especially are they on the watch for the servant of the party — Ferdinand — a young man seventeen years old. Although a servant, he has a well-filled purse in his pocket, for he is going all the way to Valladolid — to get married — and has taken a liberal amount of money. Not many I servants can show so large a sum. The travellers ride till daybreak, and ' then stop at an out-of-the-way town to rest through the day, at night travelling once more. They take by-roads and pass through obscure towns, and halt again when morning comes. Ferdinand never has seen the young lady whom he is about to marry; but some of the gentlemen whom he serves say that she is very fair; that her features are regular; her hair a light chestnut; that she has a mild blue eye, and is modest and charming in all her ways. "She is the handsomest lady I ever beheld, and the most gracious in her manners," says one. Perhaps he thinks it will please Ferdinand thus to set forth the charms of the lady. At any i-ate, the praise or something else so abstracts his thoughts that, when he pays the landlord the reckoning at one of the taverns, he leaves his purse behind, and discovers, when he reaches Valladolid, that he has not a cent in his pocket! Here is a, dilemma for a young man on the eve of his marriage!
Ferdinand