The writer then refers to the tradition about _Guttemberg_ (so it is stated on this occasion, not Faust) having learned Castaldi’s art, etc., mentioning a circumstance which he supposes to indicate that Guttemberg had relations with Venice; and appears to assent to the probability of the story of the art having been founded on specimens brought home by Marco Polo. This story was in recent years diligently propagated in Northern Italy, and resulted in the erection at Feltre of a public statue of Panfilo Castaldi, bearing this inscription (besides others of like tenor):— “_To Panfilo Castaldi the illustrious Inventor of Movable Printing Types, Italy renders this Tribute of Honour, too long deferred._” In the first edition of this book I devoted a special note to the exposure of the worthlessness of the evidence for this story.[23] This note was, with the present Essay, translated and published at Venice by Comm. Berchet, but this challenge to the supporters of the patriotic romance, so far as I have heard, brought none of them into the lists in its defence. But since Castaldi has got his statue from the printers of Lombardy, would it not be mere equity that the mariners of Spain should set up a statue at Huelva to the Pilot Alonzo Sanchez of that port, who, according to Spanish historians, after discovering the New World, died in the house of Columbus at Terceira, and left the crafty Genoese to appropriate his journals, and rob him of his fame? Seriously; if anybody in Feltre cares for the real reputation of his native city, let him do his best to have that preposterous and discreditable fiction removed from the base of the statue. If Castaldi has deserved a statue on other and truer grounds let _him_ stand; if not, let him be burnt into honest lime! I imagine that the original story that attracted Mr. Curzon was more _jeu d’esprit_ than anything else; but that the author, finding what a stone he had set rolling, did not venture to retract. [Sidenote: Frequent opportunities for such introduction in the age following Polo’s.]