it afterward considered as an opponent.

"Among the number of blessings which we ought to praise God for having
vouchsafed during your pontificate," says a dedication in the time of
Paul II., "is this invention, which enables the poorest to procure
libraries at a low price. Is it not a great glory to your Holiness, that
volumes which used to cost _one hundred pieces of gold_ are now to be
bought for four, or even less, and that the fruits of genius, heretofore
the prey of the worms and buried in dust, begin under your reign to
arise from the dead, and to multiply profusely over all the earth?"

Meanwhile, Faust the banker, and Schoeffer the workman, Gutenberg's new
partners, were not long in giving way, like his former partner, one
Mentel or Metelin at Strasburg, to the temptation of absorbing by
degrees Gutenberg's glory, the most tempting of all possessions, because
of its immortality. Like many others, they hoped to deceive posterity,
if not their own contemporaries. After recognizing, in the Epistle
Dedicatory prefixed to the German translation of Livy, printed by Hans
Schoeffer, and addressed to the Emperor Maximilian, "that the art of
printing was invented at Mainz by that sublime mechanician Hans von
Gutenberg," they forgot this confession, and seven years later assumed
to themselves all the merit and honor of the discovery.

A short time afterward, the Emperor Maximilian, erecting the printers
and compositors into a species of intellectual priesthood, relieved them
by the nobility of their occupation from all degradation of rank. He
ennobled the art and the artists together; he authorized them to wear
robes embroidered with gold and silver, which nobles only had a right to
wear, and gave them for armorial bearings an eagle with his wings spread
over a globe, a symbol of the flight of written thoughts, and of its
conquest of the world.

But Gutenberg was no longer upon earth to enjoy the possession of that
intellectual world, religious and political, of which he had only had a
glimpse, like Moses, in the vision of his dream in the monastery of St.
Arbogast. Despoiled by his partners of his property and of his fame;
expelled again, and for the last time, from his country by poverty, his
only consolation being that he was followed by his wife, who remained
faithful through all his troubles; deprived by death of all his
children; advanced in years, without bread, and soon afterward, by his
wife's decease, a wido