until about the year 1472, when a better method having been introduced by disciples of the Mentz school, they sold off their stock and retired. But all these allegations are based upon suppositions; there is no proof whatever that such was the case: only, it is evident that some such story must be contrived, in order to account for the pewter wine-pots being manufactured out of the waste and worn-out types. But then the part of the narrative of Junius where the wine-pots are alluded to, does not tally with that other part, wherein it is stated that the thief and his accomplice decamped with “the collection of types, and _all_ the implements his master had got together.” For Junius does not say, that Laurentius Janssoen Coster got together fresh implements, and made new types; nor does he intimate that his family did so after his decease. On the contrary, he speaks of the theft as an irreparable loss, the thought of which made the old book-binder Cornelius, curse with the greatest vehemence. This irascible garrulous old man is the same who, when a boy, is said to have been employed in Coster’s printing office, and who, when upwards of eighty years old, told the story to Nicholas Galius the old gentlemen of tenacious memory, who in his turn told it to his pupil Junius. It is plain that the sole object of the original tellers of the story of the stranger, servant, or thief, was to account for the otherwise inexplicable fact, that the world was persuaded that printing originated at Mentz, instead of, as the tradition-mongers would have it, at Haarlem. It is singular that Van Zuyren and Coornhert make no mention of Coster and the wine-pots. They had had the house pointed out to them, where printing was said to have been invented and first practised in private and in a very rude and imperfect form; and if that house really belonged to the family of Laurent Janssoen, copies of the books printed,--the old types themselves,--the original prototypes of the art of Typography--ought surely to have been the pride and glory of the house, rather than pewter wine-pots, a common enough article of household furniture.