* I will not, says the author of the Death of Gutenberg, let the authority for the blindness of my hero rest on fiction alone. My readers will permit me to cite the testimony of a man who was contemporary with Gutenberg, Wimphelin of Schlestadt, who at the age of fifteen came to Strasburg, in the year 1465. He says distinctly, in speaking of Gutenberg, in his catalogue of the Bishops of Strasburg written in 1508: “ductu cujusdam Johannis Gensfleisch, ex senio cæci.”
Gutenberg died neglected and in destitution. His death excited no interest among his careless and ungrateful contemporaries. It is only on the faith of a dusty old parchment, which does not even make direct mention of the inventor of printing, that we learn that John Gutenberg must have been gathered to his fathers about the 24th of February, 1468. In what place? That remains uncertain, and even to this day we should be ignorant on that point had not an inscription written in his honour by Adam Gelthuss, a relation of the printer, fallen accidentally into our hands. It is in Latin, and says that the bones of Gutenberg repose in the Church of St. François at Maïence.
So much for history. As for us, it is with a sensation of pain, and a blush on our forehead, that we close this page of our book, in which we have narrated the acts and discourses worthy of admiration, and the death of him who discovered the most remarkable, the most wonderful of all the arts, that which is destined to re-model the world.
Poetry in composing a picture, of which the plot has been gathered thread by thread from the dark abyss of archives, has taken upon herself to throw a ray of light on the last days of the great inventor, to cast on his tomb a palm-branch of peace and of hope. Was that not her right? And has she any occasion to justify herself? In our opinion the noblest duty of intelligence, as well as its most glorious appanage, is to enlighten, to reconcile, to restore to light, especially when life has only left behind it a few vague shadows, and an unknown tomb!
Punctuation and the “long s” have been modernised; spelling has been retained as it appears in the original publication.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of John Gutenberg, by Franz von Dingelstedt