_A monument in sculpture._ That is to say, a lame subscription, a committee, five-and-twenty abusive paragraphs before the thing is done, one more when, ten years after, it is completed, and a short notice in the handbooks of London in all time to come.
If these two modes are abandoned, many others would be proposed. Mine would be, a subscription to defray the expense of publishing, on a large scale, a book of fac-similes of early typography, to be sold at a cheap rate, with such prefatory matter as would form an accurate popular history of printing from 1450 to 1550. The great interest with which I saw plain working men looking at the treasures now exhibited in glass cases at the British Museum, made me think of this.
Reference is frequently made upon the origin of printing, to the _fasciculus temporum_, or _Cologne Chronicle_. In one place I find a citation in support of the Gutenberg Bible having been commenced in 1450; in another citation it is only affirmed that printing was first done in that year. The only edition I have the means of consulting at this moment is that of Ratdolt, 1484. And here I find nothing about printing except that, of the year 1457 and thereabouts, it is said that
"Artifices mira celeritate subtiliores solito fiunt. Et impressores librorum multiplicant in terra."
In the preface Ratdolt says that he had printed the _fasciculus_ three times already, of which Hain mentions two. He says, moreover, that this fourth (Venice) edition was _cura et opera diligentiori_. Did Ratdolt, after inquiry, abandon the more specific account above cited, and content himself with the above sentence, as expressing all that could be verified; or, as I have sometimes supposed, do _different books_ circulate under the title of _fasciculus temporum_? Be this as it may, Ratdolt expressly refers to the great impulse which the mechanical arts in general received just about the time when printing became common. Now we may hope the same thing of the decennium on which we are entering, the beginning of which is made conspicuous by the great forcing-house of art, which has not yet got the name it is to keep.
_Bible divination in Suffolk._--In Suffolk it is a practice on New Year's Eve to open a Bible at midnight, and the passage upon which they stick a pin will be the luck (good or bad) that attends them the following year.