Printing remained, as long as its first artificers could keep it, a secret and occult art; and it is the only one that ceaselessly operates all the miracles which the others had vainly promised. Who first thought to carve the wooden immoveable letters on blocks?--to stamp the first sheet which ever was imprinted? Or who, second in invention, but first in utility, imagined to cast the metal with fusile types, separate from each other?--to fix this scattered alphabet in a form, and thus by one stroke write a thousand manuscripts, and, with the identical letters, multiply not a single work, but all sorts of works hereafter? Was it fortunate chance, or deliberate meditation, or both in gradual discovery, which produced this invention? In truth, we can neither detect the rude beginnings, nor hardly dare to fix on the beginners. The _Origines Typographicæ_ are, even at this late hour, provoking a fierce controversy, not only among those who live in the shades of their libraries, but with honest burghers; for the glory of patriotism has connected itself with the invention of an art which came to us like a divine revelation in the history of man. But the place, the mode, and the person--the invention and the inventor--are the subjects of volumes! Votaries of Fust, of Schöffer, of Gutenberg, of Costar! A sullen silence or a deadly feud is your only response. Ye jealous cities of Mentz, of Strasburg, and of Haarlem, each of ye have your armed champion at your gates![1] The mystical eulogist of the art of printing, who declared that "the invention came from Heaven," was not more at a loss to detect the origin than those who have sought for it among the earliest printers.[2] Learned but angry disputants on the origin of printing, what if the art can boast of no single inventor, and was not the product of a single act? Consider the varieties of its practice, the change of wood to metal, the fixed to the moveable type; view the complexity of its machinery; repeated attempts must often have preceded so many inventions ere they terminated in the great one. From the imperfect and contradictory notices of the early essays--and of the very earliest we may have no record--we must infer that the art, though secret, was progressive, and that many imperfect beginnings were going on at the same time in different places.