The only certainty in the history of printing, after all the fables of its origin, is its native place. It is a German romance enlivened by some mysterious adventures, wanting only the opening pages, which no one can supply.[9] Even the most philosophic of bibliographers, Daunou, utters a cry of despair, and moreover, at this late day, seems at a loss to decide on the nature of the influence of the art of printing! "We live too near the epoch of the discovery of printing to judge accurately of its influence, and too far from it to know the circumstances which gave birth to it." Our sage seems to think that another cycle of at least a thousand years must pass away ere we can decide on the real influence of printing over the destinies of man: this new tree of knowledge bears other fruit than that of its own sweetness, source of good and evil, of sense and of nonsense! whence we pluck the windy fruitage of opinions, crude and changeable! How has it happened that such a plain story as that of the art of printing should have sunk into a romance? Solely because the monopolisers dreaded discovery. It originated in deception, and could only flourish for their commercial spirit in mysterious obscurity. Among the first artisans of printing every one sought to hide his work, and even to blind the workmen. After their operations, they cautiously unscrewed the four sides of their forms, and threw the scattered type beneath, for, as one craftily observed to his partner, "When the component parts of the press are in pieces, no one will understand what they mean." One of the early printers of the fifteenth century at Mutina, or Modena, professes his press to have been _in ædibus subterraneis_--doubtless, if possible, still further to darken the occult mystery. They delivered themselves in a mystical style when they alluded to their unnamed art, and impressed on the marvelling reader that the volume he held in his hand was the work of some supernatural agency. They announced that the volumes in this newly-found art were "neither drawn, nor written with a pen and ink, as all books before had been." In the "Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," our honest printer, plain Caxton, caught the hyperbolical style of the dark monopolising spirit of the confraternity. I give his words, having first spelt them. "I have practised and learned at my great charge, and dispense to ordain (put in order) this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that _every man may have them_ AT ONCE; for all the books of this story, thus imprinted as ye see, were _begun in one day, and also finished in one day_." A volume of more than seven hundred folio pages, "begun and finished in one day," was not the less marvellous for being impossible. But for the times was the style! Caxton would keep up the wonder and the mystery of an art which men did not yet comprehend;