hich would have exposed
the secret of all his processes. He evaded them, preferring an adverse
decision to the publication of his art. To succeed in penetrating the
secret of the discovery which filled people's imaginations, the judges
summoned his most confidential workmen, and required them to give
evidence of what they knew. These men, simple-minded, yet faithful and
strongly attached to Gutenberg, refused to reveal anything. Their
master's secret was safer in their hearts than in the breasts of his
more grasping associates. None of the great mysteries of the art
transpired. Gutenberg, ruined, condemned, perhaps banished, retired
alone and in poverty to Mainz, his native place, to recommence his
labors and begin his life and fame anew.

He was still young, and the report of his lawsuit at Strasburg had made
his fame known all over Germany, but he returned a workman to a city
which he had quitted as a knight. Humiliation, poverty, and glory
contended with each other in his fate and in the behavior of his
fellow-citizens. Love alone recognized him for what he had been, and for
what he was one day to become.

On his return to Mainz, having been relieved from degradation and ruin
by the woman he loved, as Mohammed was by his first wife, Gutenberg gave
himself entirely up to his art, entered into partnership with Faust and
Schoeffer, Faust's son-in-law; established offices at Mainz, and
published, still under the name of the firm, Bibles and Psalters, of
remarkable perfection of type.

Schoeffer had for a long time carried on the business of a scrivener,
and a trade in manuscripts in Paris. His travels, and his intimacy with
the artists of that town, had made him acquainted with mechanical
processes for working in metals, which he adapted, on his return to
Mainz, to the art of printing. These new means enabled him to cast
movable leaden types in a copper matrix, with greater precision than
before, and thus to give great neatness to the letters. It was by this
new process that the Psalter, the first book bearing a date, was printed
in 1457. Soon afterward the Mainz Bible, recognized as a masterpiece of
art, was produced under the direction of Gutenberg, from types founded
by Peter Schoeffer's process.

The tendency of the new art, which began by cheapening sacred books
under the auspices of the Church alone, escaped, during the first years
of its existence, the notice of the Roman court, which saw an auxiliary
in what