A new invention never fails to engage curiosity. And when a commodity never before seen excited purchasers, to the advantage of the inventor, the admiration of the art increased, dependents were enlarged, and workmen multiplied; the first calamitous incident! Among these was one John. Whether, as we suspect, he had ominously the name of Faustus--unfaithful and unlucky to his master,--or whether he was really a person of that name, I shall not much inquire; being unwilling to molest the silent shades, who suffer from a consciousness of their past actions in this life. This man, bound by oath to keep the secret of printing, when he thought he had learned the art of joining the letters, the method of casting the types, and other things of that nature, taking the most convenient time that was possible, on Christmas eve, when every one was customarily employed in lustral sacrifices, _seizes the collection of types, and all the implements his master had got together_, and, with one accomplice, marches off to Amsterdam, thence to Cologne, and at last settled at Mentz, as at an asylum of security, where he might go to work with the tools he had stolen. It is certain that in a year’s time, viz. in 1442, the _Doctrinale_ of Alexander Gallus, which was a grammar much used at that time, together with the _Tracts_ of Peter of Spain, came forth there, from the same types as Laurentius had made use of at Haarlem. These were the first products of his press. These are the principal circumstances that I have collected from credible persons, far advanced in years, which they have transmitted like a flaming torch from hand to hand. I have also met with others who have confirmed the same.”[86] Junius’s principal informant was, he says, his tutor, Nicholas Galius, an old gentlemen of very tenacious memory, who related that when a boy, he “had often heard one Cornelius, a bookbinder (then upwards of eighty years of age, who had when a youth, assisted at the printing office of Coster), describe with great earnestness the numerous trials and experiments made by his master in the infancy of the invention. When he came to that part of his narrative touching the robbery, he would burst into tears, and curse with the greatest vehemence those nights in which he had slept with so vile a miscreant, declaring that were he still alive, he could with pleasure execute the thief with his own hands.” Junius states, that he received a similar account from Quirinus Talesius, the Burgomaster, who asserted that it was recited to him by the said Cornelius: the latter died in 1515.[87]