The sole authority for one Lawrence Coster having invented wood-engraving, block-printing, and typography, is Hadrian Junius, who was born at Horn in North Holland, in 1511. He took up his abode at Harlem in 1560. During his residence in that city he commenced his Batavia,--the work in which the account of Coster first appeared,--which, from the preface, would seem to have been finished in January, 1575. He died the 16th June in the same year, and his book was not published until 1588, twelve years after his decease.[III-59] In this work, which is a topographical and historical account of Holland, or more properly of the country included within the limits of ancient Batavia, we find the first account of Lawrence Coster as the inventor of typography. Almost every succeeding advocate of Coster’s pretensions has taken the liberty of altering, amplifying, or contradicting the account of Junius according as it might suit his own line of argument; but not one of them has been able to produce a single solitary fact in confirmation of it. Scriverius, Seiz, Meerman, and Koning are fertile in their conjectures about the thief that stole Coster’s types, but they are miserably barren in their proofs of his having had types to be stolen. “If the variety of opinions,” observes Naude, speaking of Coster’s invention, “may be taken as an indication of the falsehood of any theory, it is impossible that this should be true”. Since Naude’s time the number of Coster’s advocates has been increased by Seiz, Meerman, and Koning;[III-60] who, if they have not been able to produce any evidence of the existence of Lawrence Coster as a printer, have at least been fertile in conjectures respecting the thief. They have not strengthened but weakened the Costerian triumphal arch raised by Junius, for they have all more or less knocked a piece of it away; and even where they have pretended to make repairs, it has merely been “one nail driving another out.” [Footnote III-59: Junius was a physician, and unquestionably a learned man. He is the author of a nomenclator in Latin, Greek, Dutch, and French. An edition, with the English synonyms, by John Higins and Abraham Fleming, was printed at London in 1585. The following passage concerning Junius occurs in Southey’s Biographical Sketch of the Earl of Surrey in the “Select Works of the British Poets from Chaucer to Jonson:” “Surrey is next found distinguishing himself at the siege of Landrecy. At that siege Bonner, who was afterwards so eminently infamous, invited Hadrian Junius to England. When that distinguished scholar arrived, Bonner wanted either the means, or more probably the heart, to assist him; but Surrey took him into his family in the capacity of physician, and gave him a pension of fifty angels.”]