The art of printing makes Mayence immortal, and here we stopped to look at the monument to Guttenberg, its inventor, a grand statue by Thorvaldsen. It is the fate of few inventors to get their due in their lifetime; some of them want bread, and the public will not give them even a stone till long after they have been starved to death. It was the fate of Guttenberg to struggle hard for years against rival claimants to the credit and the profit of his invention, and so incredulous is the world of the truth,—though ready enough to believe a lie,—that his existence was called in question, and his name has been pronounced a myth. And to this day there are people who think that Faust, who is popularly reported to be the—or in league with the—devil, had more to do with the black art invention than Guttenberg. They, that is Guttenberg and Faust, were in partnership for a while, but that was long after the real inventor had made the art a success, and the claims of Faust and his son-in-law Schoffer, both of whom were willing to be credited with the invention, have now given way to the light of evidence, and Guttenberg holds his own against the field. It is in legal proof that as early as 1438 Guttenberg was at work with his press and movable types. In 1450 he formed a partnership with Faust to carry on the business of printing, and he died in 1468. In a book published at Mayence in 1505, Johan Schoffer states “that the admirable art of printing was invented in Mentz (Mayence), in 1450, by the ingenious Johan Guttenberg, and was subsequently improved and handed down to posterity by the capital and labor of Johan Faust and Peter Schoffer.” The writer of this was the son of Peter Schoffer. He is mistaken in the date, for it is easily proved that Guttenberg was printing many years before 1450, which was the date not of the invention, but of his entering into partnership with Faust.