"Aliter non fit, avite, liber."--MARTIAL.


It is more than probable that, at the first discovery of that
mightiest of arts, which has so tended to facilitate every other--the
art of printing--many old-fashioned people looked with a jealous eye
on the innovation. Accustomed to a written character, their eyes
became wearied by the crabbedness and formality of type. It was like
travelling on the paved and rectilinear roads of France, after winding
among the blooming hedgerows of England; and how dingy and graceless
must have appeared the first printed copy of the Holy Bible, to those
accustomed to luxuriate in emblazoned missals, amid all the pride,
pomp, and vellum of glorious MS.!

Dangerous and democratic, too, must have appeared the new art, which,
by plebeianizing knowledge and enlightening the mass, deprived the law
and the prophets of half their terrors, and disrobed priestcraft and
kingcraft of their mystery. We can imagine that, as soon as a printed
book ceased to be a great rarity, it became an object of great
abhorrence.

There were many, no doubt, to prophesy, as on occasion of every new
invention, that it was all very well for a novelty; but that the thing
would not, and could not last! How were the poor copyists to get their
living if their occupation was taken from them? How were so many
monasteries to be maintained which had subsisted on _manuscriptum_?
And, then, what prince in his right senses would allow a
printing-press to be set up in his dominions--a source of sedition and
heresy--an implement of disaffection and schism? The free towns,
perhaps, might foster this pernicious art, and certain evilly-disposed