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Sebastian Cabot, Captain and Pilot Major of His Sacred Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Don Carlos the 5 of this name, and King our Lord, made this figure extended in plane in the year of the birth of our

Saviour Jesus Christ, 1544.

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The Fifteenth Century a time of awakening and difcovery. Printing acceffory to, and a quickener of, Maritime energy. First beginning of the Oriental trade, until its abforption by the Venetians.

HE clofing decades of the fifteenth century form one of the turning points of the world's history.

Darkness had covered the earth,

and thick darkness had mantled around its people; but now it began to feel the folid land; to emerge from the mire of ignorance and fuperftition in which it had long been floundering, and to discern, though as yet but dimly, in the grey dawning light, the mifty path of its future. travel.

B

Printing, 15th Cen

tury.

That mighty difcovery, printing, was like a new creation, and God's fiat, "Light BE!" was as potent in the world of intellect as it erft was in the world of matter.

The buried treasure of the ancients was now exhumed; the garnered ftore of the gathered wisdom of the bygone ages, hitherto inacceffible, was unlocked, and the living feed, scattered over the globe, gladdened its inhabitants, enlarging and enriching their minds, and was hailed with rapture by all who valued learning.

The early printers were either scholars themfelves, or they kept learned men in their employment to revise and correct each sheet as it came from the prefs.

Hence, books were at firft luxuries in which only popes, emperors, and kings could indulge.

The first object of the printers was rather to diffufe the accumulated learning of the past, than to discover and develope new mines of intellect in the living age; earnestly they fet themselves to the task of refcuing the scattered manuscripts of the orators, hiftorians, poets

and philofophers of Greece and Rome from oblivion; and foon placed thefe beyond the risk of extinction from neglect or ignorant careleffness.

As foon as the princes and public libraries, &c., were fupplied, the craving defires of men of letters, but of limited means, elicited cheaper editions, which reduced at once the costly and cumbrous folio to the compact neat octavo or duodecimo.

Very foon the printer found there was a market for his wares in the Universities, large towns, and amongst at least a portion of the country gentry and clergy, who conftantly demanded cheaper editions of the early claffics.

This demand opened, widened, and deepened the fountains of literature. Scholarly printers, like Aldus, no longer waited for the approving nod of pope, emperor, or cardinal, ere they began to print; and with a regular and increafing demand, fervile dependence on great patrons died out.

Brought now into collifion with the mighty dead, the living intellect hitherto "cabined, cribbed, confined," began to to germinate;

Great demand for

books.

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