Who was the first printer? You may read all the books, pamphlets, and articles; you may consider all the arguments, and in the long run you will know no more than you knew at the beginning. Perhaps it was Coster of Haarlem, or perhaps it was Gutenberg of Mainz. No one knows, and really it matters little except for the antiquary and the historian. At this period, as we have seen, some modification in the old method of copying was certain to be invented. It was by the greatest good luck, I have always thought, that a sort of shorthand, a representation of words by little easy symbols, was not invented. For instance, supposing a separate symbol for each of the prepositions, articles, and auxiliary verbs, and other separate symbols for the commoner words, there might be some thousands of symbols in all to be learned by the scribe; but his labor would be reduced to one-tenth. They might have invented some such method. Then, satisfied with the result, we should have gone on for centuries, and the art of printing would still have to be invented. But the time was come, and the invention, happily, came with it. Had printing been invented two centuries before, it would have been neglected and speedily forgotten, because there was no demand for books. Had it been invented two centuries later, it would have had to contend against some other contrivance for shortening labor and cheapening books. If an ingenious projector discovers some great truth or invents some useful contrivance before or after his time, he is lost--he and his discovery. Thus, in the reign of James the First a man of great ingenuity contrived a submarine boat--he was before his age. In the middle of the last century another ingenious person discovered a way of sending messages by electricity--he was before his age. In a romance, now a hundred and fifty years old, the possibility of photography was imagined by another person before his age. Men whose ideas are much before their age receive, as their reward, contempt, certainly; imprisonment, probably; and perhaps death in one of its more unpleasant forms. The generally received story, after all that has been said, is this: There was a certain Johann Gensfleisch von Sorgenloch, called Zum Gutenberg, a man of noble family, who was born in Mainz somewhere about the end of the fourteenth century. He removed from his native town to Strasbourg, where he began experimenting upon wood blocks. He then, with the idea of printing clearly defined in his mind, perhaps with type already cut in wood, went back to Mainz and entered into partnership with three others, named Riffe, Heitman, and Dritzchen. Documents still exist which prove this partnership, and contemporary evidence is clear [Illustration: CAXTON’S HOUSE IN THE ALMONRY, WESTMINSTER.]