The French were highly indignant at the loss of so important a place, and resolved upon attempting the recovery of it from its victors, as soon as the mighty objects which claimed on all sides the activity and energy of their rulers and generals, were accomplished; and accordingly, in June 1795, the French army again blockaded this devoted city, during which it sustained a renewal of its suffering, from which it again was relieved by the successful operations of Mareschal Clairfayt, at the head of the Austrians against the revolutionary troops, who were attacked and routed upon the heights of Mornbach, when the Mareschal appeared before Mayence, attacked and carried the entrenched camp of the enemy, upon which the skill of their ablest engineers had been exerted for eleven months to render it invulnerable. General Schaal, who occupied this strong position, on the retreat of Jourdan, with fifty-two battalions of infantry and five regiments of cavalry, was obliged to retire with great loss in cannon, ammunition and men. In this bombardment some Tyrol sharp-shooters displayed their wonted skill in an amazing manner, by killing, from the banks of Cassel, several French officers with their rifle-pieces, who were walking on the ramparts on the opposite side of the river, the breadth of which I have already ascertained by the length of the floating bridge. In the beginning of the year 1797 a better destiny smiled upon the French arms in this region, and Moreau and Hoche made both sides of the Rhine resound with their victories, when the troops which garrisoned Mayence, to prevent the entire and unavailing demolition of the city, relinquished its possession, and the French remained masters of it. Volumes have been written upon the superior pretension of Mayence to the original invention of the art of printing, and to transfer the honours of the discovery from Lawrence Coster of Haarlem to John Guttenburg, a citizen of this place. A vast deal of special pleading has been displayed on both sides; and, to use a jockey phrase, these racers for the merited gratitude and admiration of all who followed them, reached the goal almost “neck and neck,” but the majority of judgments given appropriate the glory to Coster: his mode was the simplest, and therefore thought to be the earliest; his moulds were made of wood and immoveable, and he stamped the paper only on one side: Guttenburg printed on both sides of the leaf with moveable metal types.