Well done, Peter Schoeffer! we cannot sufficiently admire thy taste, patience, and perseverance. What an infinite deal of labor and pains it cost thee to design and engrave hundreds of these illuminated letters for the Bible! Besides, there was the general superintendence of type-cutting; for every letter was drafted by the same hand. We are puzzled to think where you acquired your skill. It is said that you were famously started under the fostering care of Father Melchoir, himself a good copyist, and then improved your style by two years’ application at the University of Paris. And all this that the Bible may be fittingly printed! Little did you think when a student at the Cathedral of Strasbourg, for what you were studying. Neither did it occur to you while your eye was schooled for the conception, and your hand for the execution of beauty, at Paris, for what you were preparing. In due time Martin returned from his mission, bearing a Bible in manuscript, in a satchel on his back, and great were the rejoicings and congratulations of the firm and their families. Gutenberg, Faust, and Schoeffer now became more and more absorbed in the various divisions of the art of printing, preparatory to setting the Bible in type in the best style. The simple branch of inventing and making ink, for example, cost time and patience; many experiments being tried before the right combination was found. Common writing ink would not answer, being so liquid as to deface the paper with blots. Finally, a mixture of linseed oil and lamp-black or soot was tried, and found to possess the right consistence. They succeeded so well in compounding it that, as one has said, “their works show a depth and richness of color which excites the envy of the moderns; nor has it turned brown, or rendered the surrounding paper in the least degree dingy.” It was applied to the type by dabbers. These were balls of skin stuffed with wool, precisely like those used forty years ago. The types were disposed in cases much as they are now. The firm was getting on finely, having prepared several hundred pounds’ weight of type for the Bible, when Schoeffer, getting weary of this monotonous cutting, “and being ardently desirous to improve the art,” bethought him of trying to invent a simpler and speedier method of preparing type.