Although so little is positively known respecting John Meydenbach, Gutemberg’s assistant, yet Von Murr thinks that there is reason to suppose that he was the artist who engraved the large initial letters for the Psalter of 1457. Fischer, who declares that there is no sufficient grounds for this conjecture, confidently assumes, from false premises, that those letters were engraved by Gutemberg, “a person experienced in such work,” adds he, “as we are taught by his residence at Strasburg.” From the account that we have of his residence and pursuits at Strasburg, however, we are taught no such thing. We only learn from it he was engaged in some invention which related to printing. We learn that Conrad Saspach made him a press, and it is conjectured that the goldsmith Hanns Dunne was employed to engrave his letters; but there is not a word of his being an experienced wood engraver, nor is there a well authenticated passage in any account of his life from which it might be concluded that he ever engraved a single letter. Fischer’s reasons for supposing that Gutemberg engraved the large letters in Faust and Scheffer’s Psalter are, however, contradicted by facts. Having seen a few leaves of a Donatus ornamented with the same initial letters as the Psalter, he directly concluded that the former was printed by Gutemberg and Faust prior to the dissolution of their partnership; and not satisfied with this leap he takes another, and arrives at the conclusion that they were engraved by Gutemberg, as “_his_ modesty only could allow such works to appear without his name.” Although we have no information respecting the artist by whom those letters were engraved, yet it is not unlikely that they were suggested, if not actually drawn by Scheffer, who, from his profession of a scribe or writer[IV-5] previous to his connexion with Faust, may be supposed to have been well acquainted with the various kinds of flowered and ornamented capitals with which manuscripts of that and preceding centuries were embellished. It is not unusual to find manuscripts of the early part of the fifteenth century embellished with capitals of two colours, red and blue, in the same taste as in the Psalter; and there is now lying before me a capital P, drawn on vellum in red and blue ink, in a manuscript apparently of the date of 1430, which is so like the same letter in the Psalter that the one might be supposed to have suggested the other. [Footnote IV-5: Scheffer previous to his connexion with Faust was a “clericus,”--not a _clerk_ as distinguished from a layman, but a writer or scribe. A specimen of his “set-hand,” written at Paris in 1449, is given by Schœpflin in his Vindiciæ Typographicæ. Several of the earliest printers were writers or illuminators; among whom may be mentioned John Mentelin of Strasburg, John Baemler of Augsburg, Ulric Zell of Cologne, and Colard Mansion of Bruges.]