After thus vagabondizing it for some, time, he was discovered by the consul, who returned him to his friends in England. They received him with joy, and a private tutor was employed to recover those rudiments of learning which a life of dissipation, blackguardism, and vulgarity, might have obliterated. Wortley was sent to the West Indies, where he remained for some time; then returned to England, acted according to the dignity of his birth, was chosen a member, and served in two successive parliaments. His expenses exceeding his income, he became involved in debt, quitted his native country, and commenced that wandering traveller he continued till the time of his death. Having visited most of the eastern countries, he contracted a partiality for their manners. He drank little wine; a great deal of coffee; wore a long beard; smoked much; and, even whilst at Venice, he was habited in the eastern style. He sat crosslegged in the Turkish fashion from choice. With the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Chaldaic, and the Persian languages, he was as well acquainted as with his native tongue. He published several pieces; one on the "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire ;" another on "The Causes of Earthquakes." He had seraglios of wives, but the lady whom he married in England was a washerwoman, with whom he did not cohabit. When she died without leaving issue to him, being unwilling that his estate should go to the Bute family, he set out for England to marry a young woman already pregnant, whom a friend had provided for him, but he died on his journey.

WITH SOME NOTICES OF JOHN FUST, HIS PARTNER.

HE year 1453 is a memorable epoch in history. The middle of the century that witnessed the revival of knowledge and the triumph of classical learning in the south of Europe, was marked also by the final overthrow of the eastern empire, and the establishment of the followers of Mahornet, with a firm footing on the soil from whence the eastern rulers of the dismembered Roman empire were driven. This important event had long been foreshadowed by the luxury and decaying vigour of the eastern empire. The fall of Constantinople, in 1453, accomplished its destiny, and the highways were forthwith crowded with fugitives seeking safety in the unconquered kingdoms of Christendom. On the sacking of Constantinople, the learned men of Greece were scattered through the capitals of Europe, bearing with them invaluable treasures in the ancient Greek manuscripts they had rescued from the spoiler. The greater number of these were conveyed to Italy, where a general excitement prevailed on behalf of classical learning, so that numerous scholars were ready to

welcome the fugitives, and hail the literary treasures they brought with them, as the most valuable gifts that the western could derive from the eastern empire.

Cosmo de Medici, the celebrated Florentine, was specially active at this period, both in welcoming the learned strangers, and in acquiring, by every means in his power, the literary treasures which the inroads of barbarism had scattered, and threatened to destroy. Thousands of manuscripts were brought home by the agents of this indefatigable collector, many of them. unknown before; and numerous transcribers were employed in slowly multiplying copies of Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the more recent works of the Greek fathers; so that we in all probability owe to the princely merchant of Florence the preservation of many of these invaluable treasures of antiquity.

While, however, the south of Europe was thus diligently engaged in preserving and multiplying, by the slow and costly process of the copiers, the treasures of ancient literature, a process was silently evolving in the north, destined to effect a mighty revolution on the church, and on the world. At the very time when the Moslem troops were mustering on the European shores, and the walls of Constantinople were falling before these fanatical besiegers, an unnoticed and obscure German mechanic was maturing an art which was destined to prove the most important discovery in the history of the world, and to build up new empires on a more stable basis than had been dreamt of in the republics of Greece, or the despotic empires of the Romans and Goths.

At the village of Sulgeloch, near Mentz, or Mayence, as it is now called, John Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, was born, in the year 1397. Of his childhood and youth scarcely any thing is known, for he closed his life in poverty, and died while others were reaping the profits of his great invention. He appears, from such glimpses as we obtain of his early years, to have been a man of great energy; and of that natural vehemence, and animal life, which only requires a sound bias, and the selection of some sufficient object of pursuit, to lead to high and valuable attainments. His youth was passed in the city of Mentz, pursuing some mechanical occupation, the exact nature of which is not known; but there can be little doubt, from the success of his labours at a later date, that his early employment was such as prepared him for his great work.

Meanwhile, however, the young apprentice of Mayence found other matters to keep his hands in employment, and to satisfy his restless and still unsatisfied energies. The period when he left his quiet native village of Sulgeloch, to seek for such education for head and hand as the neighbouring Rhenish capital could afford him, was during the early years of the fifteenth century, an era of great and universal activity. The burghers the free cities were rising into importance; the old feudal bondage that

had so long formed the sole tie between the nobles and the rural population, was rapidly becoming modified, or altogether displaced by the freer notions that had sprung up among the wealthy trading burghers of the large towns. Such a change was watched, as might be expected, with peculiar jealousy by those whose interests were thereby involved. The citizen was no less anxious to guard his newly established rights against the encroachments of the older privileged classes, than were the nobles to check every interference with their time-hallowed superiority and lordships. Numerous contests, often of a fierce and sanguinary nature, resulted from the clashing of these rival interests; and one of the earliest glimpses which we obtain of young Gutenberg, is as an active partizan in these party feuds.

Fortune at no time rewarded very liberally the exertions of poor Gutenberg; it has been reserved indeed for posterity to yield to him the tardy acknowledgment due to his genius and indomitable perseverance, wellnigh four centuries after he had been laid in his unhonoured and long-forgotten grave. Fortune seems to have been as little inclined to reward his early political struggles as the more noble and invaluable life-labours on which he was soon after to enter. "During his residence in Mentz," says one of his biographers, "he became implicated in an insurrection of the citizens against the nobility, and was compelled to fly to Strasbourg to avoid the vengeance of his victorious adversaries." No more minute account has been preserved of this civic contest, which probably differed little from similar disturbances that were of frequent occurrence at that period in most of the capitals and large commercial towns of Europe, and excited apparently as little notice then, as an ordinary street riot would now lead to. There is something, however, that cannot but strike the thoughtful reader, as very characteristic of the future inventor of the art of printing, in this early and passing glimpse of his first appearance in public life. Nobles and kings were yet to learn the power of that mighty engine that was to form the great life-work of Gutenberg; pontiffs were to tremble before its indomitable assaults; and slavery, feudalism, and unjust class-privileges of every kind, were to fall before the triumphant progress of the printingpress. We say, therefore, that it was characteristic—we would even say, it was typical, of the future inventor of printing, that his first appearance should have been as an abettor of the popular cause, in opposition to the despotic power of the nobles.

The old town of Mentz, the capital of the province of Rheinhessen, is one of the most ancient and remarkable cities of Europe. Its first erection dates before the Christian era. More recently it occupies an important and very interesting position among the Catholic bishoprics of Christendom; its historians tracing back the introduction of Christianity and the chief pastoral office there, to Crescens, who was a disciple of Paul, and suffered martyrdom there in the year 103. It is still a strange, old-fashioned, and irregular

built town, sloping downwards to the banks of the Rhine, a little below the junction of the Maine with that majestic river. The streets are narrow and gloomy; abounding with the picturesque edifices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that carry the mind back to the time when these pent-up thoroughfares formed the narrow arena for civil broils; and the hardy German apprentice, John Gutenberg, with others as bold and reckless, though now all forgotten, were leagued, with clubs and bills, against the armed retainers of the fierce German barons, and contended every pass and alley of the ancient city with their old feudal masters. Gutenberg had to learn elsewhere those arts on which his great discovery was to be founded. He hastily abandoned the town of Mentz, on finding that his zeal in the popular cause had marked him out as a special object of vengeance to the exasperated nobles, and fled, as we have seen, to the city of Strasbourg. We shall now follow him thither, and learn what may still be gleaned of his proceedings there, after the lapse of so long a period as has now intervened between the great discovery of the art of printing, and this nineteenth century, in which its mighty powers are being for the first time fully developed.

The city of Strasbourg, whither Gutenberg retired from the fury of his adversaries at Mentz, has long since been incorporated with the dependencies of the French crown. Its early history, however, discloses many interesting and remarkable incidents worthy of the honour of that great invention which it has disputed for centuries with the city of Mentz, with others strongly characteristic of the ages that preceded the illumination of the printing-press. It early obtained the privileges of a free city, and exhibited the consequent symptoms of industry and increasing prosperity. In the year 1349, a darker scene marks a memorable epoch of its history. It was visited by a fearful mortality, by which multitudes of its inhabitants were swept away; and the rest fled in terror, abandoning a city that seemed given up to the dominion of swift disease and death. The reign of a blind superstition, however, was no less powerful and influential. The terrorstricken inhabitants returned to their city when the plague abated, and fixing on the persecuted Jews as the originators of that deadly pestilence, two hundred of them were committed to the flames.

The principles of the Reformation early gained a footing in this ancient city of the German empire. They were checked for a time by the Emperor, Charles the Fifth; but notwithstanding this opposition, the Protestants gained such influence, that they obtained possession of several of the churches. Since then it has long ceased to form a part of the Germanic union. In 1681, it surrendered to Louis the Fourteenth, who was already master of the surrounding country. By him the circuit of the walls was enlarged, the fortifications were strengthened with numerous towers and bastions, and the whole defences reconstructed with such labour and skill