[Footnote III-60: Koning’s Dissertation on the Invention of Printing, which was crowned by the Society of Sciences of Harlem, was first printed at Harlem in the Dutch language in 1816. It was afterwards abridged and translated into French with the approbation, and under the revision, of the author. In 1817 he published a first supplement; and a second appeared in 1820.] Junius’s account of Coster is supposed to have been written about 1568; and in order to do justice to the claims of Harlem I shall here give a faithful translation of the “document,”--according to Mr. Ottley,--upon which they are founded. After alluding, in a preliminary rhetorical flourish, to Truth being the daughter of Time, and to her being concealed in a well, Junius thus proceeds to draw her out. “If he is the best witness, as Plutarch says, who, bound by no favour and led by no partiality, freely and fearlessly speaks what he thinks, my testimony may deservedly claim attention. I have no connexion through kindred with the deceased, his heirs, or his posterity, and I expect on this account neither favour nor reward. What I have done is performed through a regard to the memory of the dead. I shall therefore relate what I have heard from old and respectable persons who have held offices in the city, and who seriously affirmed that they had heard what they told from their elders, whose authority ought justly to entitle them to credit.” About a hundred and twenty-eight years ago,[III-61] Lawrence John, called the churchwarden or keeper,[III-62] from the profitable and honourable office which his family held by hereditary right, dwelt in a large house, which is yet standing entire, opposite the Royal Palace. This is the person who now on the most sacred ground of right puts forth his claims to the honour of having invented typography, an honour so nefariously obtained and possessed by others. Walking in a neighbouring wood, as citizens are accustomed to do after dinner and on holidays, he began to cut letters of beech-bark, with which for amusement, the letters being inverted as on a seal, he impressed short sentences on paper for the children of his son-in-law. Having succeeded so well in this, he began to think of more important undertakings, for he was a shrewd and ingenious man; and, in conjunction with his son-in-law Thomas Peter, he discovered a more glutinous and tenacious kind of ink, as he found from experience that the ink in common use occasioned blots. This Thomas Peter left four sons, all of whom were magistrates; and I mention this that all may know that the art derived its origin from a respectable and not from a mean family. He then printed whole figured pages with the text added. Of this kind I have seen specimens executed in the infancy of the art, being printed only on one side. This was a book composed in our native language by an anonymous author, and entitled _Speculum Nostræ Salutis_. In this we may observe that in the