It has been reserved for the Nineteenth century to render due honor to the “grand Typographical Triumvirate,” as they have been termed, for the noble Art by which “New shape and voice the immaterial thought Takes from the invented speaking page sublime; The Ark which mind has for it refuge wrought, Its floating Archive down the floods of Time.” With this object in view, the Gutenberg Society, to which all the writers of the Rhenish provinces belong, meet yearly at Mentz, there to celebrate the fame of Gutenberg, the chief inventor. And in 1837, a grateful posterity, animated by similar sentiments, erected in the same city, in commemoration of the Four Hundredth anniversary of the Origin of the Art, a monumental statue to his memory. On the festival at the inauguration of the statue (August 14, and following days), the Provost of Mentz published an address, to the following sentences from which every reader will doubtless most cordially assent. “If,” says the ardent Provost, “the mortal who invented that method of fixing the fugitive sounds of words which we call the Alphabet, has operated on mankind like a divinity, so also has Gutenberg’s genius brought together the once isolated inquirers, teachers and learners,--all the scattered and divided efforts for extending God’s kingdom over the whole civilized earth,--as though beneath one temple. Gutenberg’s invention, not a lucky accident, but the golden fruit of a well considered idea,--an invention made with a perfect consciousness of its end,--has, above all other causes, for more than four centuries, urged forward and established the dominion of science; and what is of the utmost importance, has immeasurably advanced the mental formation and education of the people. This invention, a true intellectual sun, has mounted above the horizon, first of the European Christians, and then of the people of other climes and other faiths, to an ever-enduring morning. It has made the return of barbarism, the isolation of mankind, the reign of darkness, impossible for all future times. It has established a public opinion,--a court of moral judicature common to all civilized nations, whatever natural divisions may separate them, as much as for the provinces of one and the same state. In a word, it has formed fellow-labourers at the never-resting loom of Christian European civilization in every quarter of the world, in almost every island of the ocean.” The example set by the citizens of Mentz was a few years later followed by those of Strasburg, in which city, as already stated, Gutenberg’s earliest efforts were made; nor were the inhabitants of Frankfort-on-the-Maine long behind,--excelling even those of Strasburg and Mentz, by combining in one grand group the statues of Gutenberg, Faust and Schœffer. Of these several specimens of the sculptor’s art Mr. Humphreys gives the following account:--