[Footnote III-64: This is an admirable instance of candour. A charge is insinuated, and presumed to be a fact, and yet the writer kindly forbears to bring forward proof, that he may not disturb the dead. History has long since given the lie to the insinuation of the thief having been Faust.] “The above is nearly what I have heard from old men worthy of credit who had received the tradition as a shining torch transferred from hand to hand, and I have heard the same related and affirmed by others. I remember being told by Nicholas Galius, the instructor of my youth,--a man of iron memory, and venerable from his long white hair,--that when a boy he had often heard one Cornelius, a bookbinder, not less than eighty years old (who had been an assistant in the same office), relate with such excited feelings the whole transaction,--the occasion of the invention, its progress, and perfection, as he had heard of them from his master,--that as often as he came to the story of the robbery he would burst into tears; and then the old man’s anger would be so roused on account of the honour that had been lost through the theft, that he appeared as if he could have hanged the thief had he been alive; and then again he would vow perdition on his sacrilegious head, and curse the nights that he had slept in the same bed with him, for the old man had been his bedfellow for some months. This does not differ from the words of Quirinus Talesius, who admitted to me that he had formerly received nearly the same account from the mouth of the same bookseller.”[III-65] [Footnote III-65: Hadriani Junii Batavia, p. 253, et sequent. Edit. Ludg. Batavor. 1588.] As Junius died upwards of twelve years before his book was published, it is doubtful whether the above account was actually written by him or not. It may have been an interpolation of an editor or a bookseller anxious for the honour of Harlem, and who might thus expect to gain currency for the story by giving it to the world under the sanction of Junius’s name. There was also another advantage attending this mode of publication; for as the reputed writer was dead, he could not be called on to answer the many objections which remain yet unexplained. The manner in which Coster, according to the preceding account, first discovered the principle of obtaining impressions from separate letters formed of the bark of the beech-tree requires no remark.[III-66] There are, however, other parts of this narrative which more especially force themselves on the attention as being at variance with reason as well as fact.