The annexed sketch represents a press in its completed form, with tympans attached to the end of the carriage, and with the frisket above the tympans. The tympans, inner and outer, are thin iron frames, one fitting into the other, on each of which is stretched a skin of parchment or a breadth of fine cloth. A woollen blanket or two with a few sheets of paper are placed between these, the whole thus forming a thin elastic pad, on which the sheet to be printed is laid. The frisket is a slender frame-work, covered with coarse paper, on which an impression is first taken; the whole of the printed part is then cut out, leaving apertures exactly corresponding with the pages of type on the carriage of the press. The frisket when folded on to the tympans, and both turned down over the forme of types and run in under the platten, preserves the sheet from contact with any thing but the inked surface of the types, when the pull, which brings down the screw and forces the platten to produce the impression, is made by the pressman who works the lever,--to whom is facetiously given the title of “the practitioner at the bar.” [Illustration] One of the consequences that ensued on the termination of the lawsuit with the Dritzehens, was a stoppage of the progress of the invention. Very probably Gutenberg, an impoverished if not a disappointed man, felt compelled to lay his projects aside, and to devote himself, for a time at least, to other and more remunerative pursuits. Nothing more at any rate is heard of the partnership, or of types or presses, until after his return to Mentz. And as printing was not practised at Strasburg until after Mentelin set up a press there, this silence is pretty conclusive as to the correctness of the surmise, that neither Dritzehen nor Heilmann nor Riffe had been entrusted with the secret of the separable types. The inference which writers adverse to the claims of Gutenberg draw from the silence in the evidence in regard to types or letters, is, that he had not then invented them. But if the press was not designed, and made, for taking impressions from types, for what else could it have been invented? Gutenberg must have had types in his possession, before he commenced experiments in connection with the press. Now these experiments commenced some time before 1436; how long cannot be ascertained; but it is clear that the original making of the types must necessarily have preceded the first attempt at making a press. But when once a small stock of metal letters had been engraved, (in itself a work of years for a single individual,) and it was found that they could not be availed of by what was then the ordinary method of producing prints, further progress with them would be stopped, until the press, which was to make them profitable, had been made.[48] The mere making of the types, however tedious and time-eating a work, was, as has already been shewn, by no means so wonderfully ingenious as some have stated it to be.