It has been remarked, that if Mentz, Gutenberg’s native place, had not been a free city, he might not have conceived or executed his invention; for despotism, like superstition, imposes silence. “It was fitting that printing and liberty should be born of the same sun and the same air.” Mentz, Strasbourg, Worms, and other municipal cities of the Rhine, were small federative republics; as Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the republics of Italy. The youth of our country find freedom favorable to thought and invention; thus young Gutenberg found it. Yet civil strife marked the history of those cities. “In them were the warlike nobility, the aspiring burghers, and the laboring people, who floated between these two contending classes, alternately caressed and oppressed by them, yet at times themselves striving for the supremacy. In these commotions, victory rested sometimes with the patrician, sometimes with the plebeian, and numbers on either side were from time to time outlawed. But these had not the sea to cross to fly the country; they traversed the Rhine. Those banished from Strasbourg, went to Mentz; those from Mentz, to Strasbourg, to await a turn of events, or the recall of the exiles.” In these intestine quarrels, young Gutenberg, himself of the nobility, “and naturally combating for the cause most holy in the eyes of a son, that of a father,” was twice vanquished and expelled by the burghers, with all the chevaliers of the family,--his mother and sisters being permitted to remain in possession of their property. Later, the free city of Frankfort offering to mediate between the nobles and plebeians, it obtained the return of those who had been banished, on condition of the equality of the two classes in the administration of the government. Meanwhile Gutenberg, having become absorbed in his inventive studies, did not return; and his mother petitioned the Republic to give him as a pension a portion of the revenue of his confiscated property. Answer was given, that the refusing to return to his own country, by the young patrician, was a declaration of hostility; and he must therefore be treated as one of its enemies. So his mother continued to send him secret supplies from her own resources. But the faithful Lady Anna did not seek to free herself from her plighted faith, because of the adversities of her lover. If he shrank from receiving her to the humble circumstances in which he had been thrown, she was still true to her vows. And as his humility and thoughtful scruples could not be overcome in any other way, she vanquished them by a legal summons; her father citing him before a magistrate of Strasbourg, to cause him to fulfill his promise of marriage. This summons of the Lady Anna to Gutenberg remains to-day as an authentic memorial of his marriage. For the faltering artisan yielded to “this generous violence of affection,” and consummated his happiness by marrying the fair plaintiff in the suit. [Illustration] [Illustration] II.