These precious volumes, as splendid as they are wonderful, have excited the admiration of all beholders.  The sharpness and elegant uniformity of the type, the lustre of the ink, and the purity of the paper leave that first great monument of the typographic art unsurpassed by any subsequent effort; nor could it be exceeded with all the appliances of the present day.

“It is a striking circumstance,” says Mr. Hallam, “that the high-minded inventors of this great art tried, at the very outset, so bold a flight as the printing of an entire Bible, and executed it with astonishing success.  It was Minerva leaping on earth in her divine strength and radiant armor, ready, at the moment of her nativity, to subdue and destroy her enemies.”

There is a curious story current about this Bible, which, as it is connected with a popular fiction, I will venture to repeat.  It is that Faust went to Paris with some of his Bibles for sale, one of which, printed on vellum and richly illuminated, he sold to the King for seven hundred and fifty crowns, and another to the Archbishop of Paris for three hundred crowns, and to the poorer clergy and the laity copies on paper as low as fifty crowns, and even less.  Faust does not appear to have disclosed the secret of how they were produced, and probably let it be supposed that they were manuscript; for the aim of the first printers was to make their books equal in beauty to the finest manuscripts, and as far as possible undistinguishable from them, to which end the large capitals and decorations were filled in by hand.

The Archbishop, proud of his purchase, showed it to the King, who, comparing it with his own, found with surprise that they tallied so exactly in every respect, excepting the illuminated ornaments, as convinced them that they were produced by some other art than transcription; and on further inquiry they found that Faust had sold a considerable number exactly similar.  Orders, therefore, were given without delay to apprehend and prosecute him as a practitioner of the black art in multiplying Holy Writ by aid of the devil.  Hence arose the popular fiction of the Devil and Dr. Faustus, which, under different phases, has found its way into every country in Europe, and probably gave rise to Goethe’s celebrated drama.

In 1455, as we find by a notarial document, dated November 6th of that year, Faust separated from Gutenberg, and successfully instituted proceedings against him for money advanced.  Gutenberg, who had exhausted all his means in bringing his invention to maturity, was obliged to mortgage and in the end surrender all his materials, and, it should seem, his printed stock.  His impoverishment may easily be accounted for when we are told, as a received fact, that before the first four sheets of his Bible were completed he had already expended four thousand crowns upon it—­a large sum in those days.  Of this his then wealthier partner reaped all the subsequent advantage.