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This trick may chance to scathe you I know what; You must contrary me! you are a princor, go. Shakspeare. PRINGLE (Sir John), an eminent physician and younger son of Sir John Pringle of Roxburgh; who took the degree of M. D. at Leyden, 1730; and published there Dissertatio Inauguralis de Marcore Senili, 4to. After having been some years professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, he was, in June 1745, appointed physician to the duke of Cumberland, and physician to the hospital of the forces in Flanders, where the earl of Stair appears to have been his patron. In February 1746 Dr. Pringle, Dr. Armstrong, and Dr. Barker, were nominated physicians to the hospital for lame, maimed, and sick soldiers, behind Buckingham House; and in April 1749 Dr. Pringle was appointed physician in ordinary to the king. In 1750 and 1755 he published Observations on the Nature and Cure of Hospital and Gaol Fevers, in a Letter to Dr. Mead, 8vo.; and in 1752 Obser

vations on the Disorders of the Army in Camp and Garrison, 8vo. On the 14th of April, 1752, he married Charlotte, daughter of Dr. Oliver, an eminent physician at Bath. In 1756 he was appointed, jointly with Dr. Wintringham, physician to his majesty's hospital for the forces of Great Britain. After the accession of king George III. Dr. Pringle was appointed physician to the queen's household in 1761; physician in ordinary to the queen in 1763, when he was admitted of the College of Physicians in London; and, on the 5th of June 1766, he was created a baronet of Great Britain. In 1772 he was elected president of the Royal Society, where his speeches for five successive years, on delivering the prize medal of Sir Godfrey Copley, gave great satisfaction. In 1777 he was appointed physician extraordinary to the king. He was also a fellow of the College of Physicians at Edinburgh, and of the Royal Medical Society at Paris; member of the Royal Academies at Paris, Stockholm, Gottingen, and of the Philosophical Societies at Edinburgh and Haerlem; and continued president of the Royal Society till November 1778; after which period he gradually withdrew from public life. He died January 18th, 1782.

PRINK, v. n. Belg. pronken. To prank; deck for show. The diminutive of prank.

Hold a good wager she was every day longer prinking in the glass than you was. Art of Tormenting.

PRINKIPO, the most eastern and considerable of the Prince's Islands, in the bay of Marmora, about a league distant from the coast of Asia Minor. It is about a mile in length, and half a mile in breadth, containing a town, now in a ruinous condition. The French merchants used formerly to have country houses on this island, but they have abandoned them, on account of the badness of the water, and other inconveniences; it is at present inhabited only by a few Greeks, who support themselves by selling wine and provisions to the pleasure parties which come from Constantinople. Long. 28° 56' E., lat. 40° 51' N.

PRINOS, winter berry, a genus of the monogynia order, and hexandria class of plants; natural order forty-third, dumosæ : CAL. sexfid: COR. monopetalous, and rotaceous; the belly exaspermous. Species ten, all native shrubs of North America and the West Indies.

PRINTING.

PRINT, v. a., v. n. & n. s. Fr. empreint; PRINTER, n. s. Ital. imprenta; PRINTING, Belg. printe. To PRINT'LESS, adj. indent or mark by pressure; impress a thing so as to leave its form; to form by impression; impress the form of type, &c., on paper, so as to make a book; the term is likewise applied to taking off copperplates by a press, and the figures of blocks, &c., used in calico, silk, and other printing: as a neuter verb, to use the typographic art; publish a book: a print is a mark or form impressed; a feature made by impression; the form, ar

rangement or size, of printing types; mould or pattern cut in wood, copper, &c.; single sheet, printed for sale; a newspaper: a printer is, ' par excellence,' one who prints books; but also applied to similar operators on linen, calico, silk, &c.: printing, the art or business of a printer: printless, that which leaves no impression.

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you. Leviticus. Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book. Job xix. 23.

My soul is but a wind,
Which passeth by, and leaves no print behind.
Sandys.

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See, the printer's boy below; Ye hawkers all, your voices lift. He was sent without any superintendant to conduct a printing-house at Norwich, and publish a weekly paper. Johnson.

Satires and lampoons on particular people circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the friends. of the parties, than by printing them. Sheridan.

PRINTING, the art of taking impressions from characters or figures, moveable and immoveable, on paper, linen, silk, &c. There are three kinds

No wheel seen, nor wheels print was in the mould of printing; the one from moveable letters for

Up they tost the sand,

imprest

Behind him.

It is so rare to see

Chapman's Iliad.

Ought that belongs to young nobility In print, that we must praise.

Suckling.

I find, at reading all over, to deliver to the printer, in that which I ought to have done to comply with my design, I am fallen very short.

Digby

While the heaven, by the sun's team untrod, Hath took no print of the approaching light, And all the spangled host keep watch.

Whilst from off the waters fleet,

Thus I set my printless feet,

O'er the cowslip's velvet head,

That bends not as I tread.

Milton.

Id.

Perhaps some footsteps printed in the clay, Will to my love direct your wand'ring way. Rose. From my breast I cannot tear

The passion, which from thence did grow;

Nor yet out of my fancy raze

The print of that supposed face.
On his fiery steed betimes he rode,

Waller.

That scarcely prints the turf on which he trod.

Dryden.

Id.

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Winds, bear me to some barren island, Where print of human feet was never seen. The prints, which we see of antiquities, may contribute to form our genius, and to give us great ideas.

To refresh the former hint;

Id.

Id.

She read her maker in a fairer print. Is it probable that a promiscuous jumble of printing letter should often fall into a method, which should stamp on paper a coherent discourse? Locke.

As soon as he begins to spell, pictures of animals should be got him, with the printed names to them.

Id.

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books; another from copper-plates for pictures; and the last from blocks, in which the representation of birds, flowers, &c., are cut for printing calicoes, linen, &c. The first is called common or letter-press printing; the second rolling-press printing; and the last calico, &c., printing. The principal difference between the three consists in this, that the first is cast in relievo, in distinct pieces; the second engraven in creux; and the third cut in relievo, and generally stamped, by placing the block upon the materials to be printed, and striking upon the back of it.

Of the above branches, letter-press printing is the most curious, and deserves the most particular notice; for to it are owing chiefly our deliverance from ignorance and error, the progress of learning, the revival of the sciences, and numberless improvements in arts, which, without this noble invention, would have been either lost to mankind, or confined to the knowledge of a few.

HISTORY. It has been a matter of considerable surprise that some method of printing was not invented at a much earlier epoch in the history of the world. The arts of statuary and sculpture arrived at very great perfection among the Romans; the cutting of their seals and dies may be considered as a kind of printing on metals; and their impressing these seals, cut in cornelians, agates, &c., on wax, was another species of printing on this substance. This was the very germ of the art; and it is perfectly astonishing that no should have thought of printing have multiplied them into a page. They set two words together as well as one; and then their foot on the very pearl, without stopping to notice or pick it up.

The origin of printing is completely enveloped in mystery; and an art which commemorates all other inventions-which hands down to posterity every important event-which immortalises the discoveries of genius and the exploits of greatness-which has been the only effectual instrument that could banish the darkness, and overturn the superstitions of a bigoted age; and of God to all mankind; this very art has left its which, above all, extends and diffuses the word own origin in obscurity, and has given employment to the studies and researches of the most learned men in Europe to determine to whom the honor of its invention is justly due.

The art of printing combines such a number and variety of branches that it would be absurd to suppose any one person could have invented the whole. In its present state of perfection, it is divided into eight or ten different kinds of manufactures; and even in its rudest state must have required such an extensive acquaintance with mechanics, chemistry, and other branches of science, as could not be supposed to fall to the lot of any one or two men. It is this circumstance, doubtless, which has given plausibility to the claims of the numerous persons handed down to us as the original inventors of the art. The simple idea may have originated with a single individual, but a second person may have made such an important improvement as almost to eclipse the value of what his predecessor had accomplished. A third person may be supposed to have rendered a still greater addition to the art, and, either in reality or in idea, to attract to himself the merit of the whole and indeed these appear to be the real merits of the case, and the only possible mode of reconciling the diversified and clashing statements which have been promulgated. The taking impressions from pages cut on blocks of wood, and from separate metal types cast for the purpose, are operations so entirely different, and the one is an art so decidedly inferior to the other, that they ought never to have been confounded under the same name: in the sequel we shall find that the merit of the two is not confined either to one person, or the honor to one place.

The honor of this invention has been appropriated to several places; to Mentz, to Strasburg, to Harlem, to Dordrecht, to Venice, to Rome, to Florence, to Basle, to Augsburg, &c. Three only of these places, however, deserve any serious consideration: viz. Harlem, Mentz, and Strasburg. At the last mentioned place many attempts appear to have been made towards the discovery and completion of the art by John Guttenberg; but, as there is no evidence that he actually brought his experiments to bear in the publication of any work at Strasburg, nothing more need be said of this city, though we shall have frequent occasion to introduce the name of this ingenious artist.

The most consistent account of the origin of the art of printing is that which is given by Hadrian, Junius, and which favors the claims of Laurence Coster, of the city of Harlem. This account is contained in his Batavia, published after his death at Leyden, more than a century after the supposed invention of the art, and is the only paper or testimony upon which the partisans of the city of Harlem found their typographical pretensions. Junius had the relation from two respectable men, Nicholaus Galius, his intimate friend and correspondent and the pupil of Galius, Quirinius Talesius, both of whom had informed him, that they had in their youth heard this same story related more than once, by a certain bookbinder, nearly eighty years of age, named Cornelius, who professed to have been one of Coster's domestics. The substance of the narration of Junius is as follows: It is now about 128 years,' he says, 'since Laurence, the son of John, a citizen of Harlem, and surnamed

Coster (that is, sacristan or church-warden, at that time an honorable office, and which his fa mily had long held by hereditary right), amused himself, during his walks in the wood near that city, with forming letters of the bark of the beech tree, by means of which he printed upon paper some verses and short sentences, for the instruction of his grand-children. With the assistance of his son-in-law Thomas, the son of Peter, he afterwards invented an ink, more viscous and tenacious than common ink, which was found to blot and fill the letters; with this new ink he printed, in the Flemish language, the Speculum nostræ Salutis, a work composed of images and letters. The leaves of this book being printed on one side only, the pages, which were left blank, were afterwards pasted together. After this, Coster abandoned the use of wooden letters, and adopted metal ones; forming them at first of lead, and latterly of tin, which metal is rather harder than the former: some metal wine cups, made from the remains of these letters, may yet be seen in the dwelling-house of his descendants. The great profits which the inventor derived from this new art induced him to increase his establishment, and with this view he took some workmen into his family. One of these, who was called John, surnamed Fust, as is uspected, or some other person bearing the name of John (it is of no great consequence which), after having learnt the art of arranging and casting types, as well as all other matters relating to the art of printing, in the knowledge of which he had been initiated under the obligation of an oath, seized the opportunity of his master being engaged at mass, on the night of Christmas eve, to carry off all the types and implements used in the printing office. He went with his plunder to Amsterdam, in the first instance, then to Cologne, and finally settled at Mentz, where he established a printing office, in which were printed, in the year 1442, with the types stolen from Harlem, the Doctrinalè Alexandri Galli, and the Tractatus Petri Hispani.'

The narrative of Junius has been questioned, and indeed violently opposed, by writers of the first literary eminence and it certainly appears a remarkable circumstance that no Dutch writer, nor any work or the fifteenth or of the beginning of the sixteenth century, has made the least mention of these facts-not even Erasmus, who, from having been born at Rotterdam in the year 1467, could hardly have been ignorant of events at once so singular and so creditable to his native country. There are several other objections to the above narrative, which we cannot here notice: but, without relying implicitly on all the statements of this narrative, it seems to us pretty evident that Coster carried the art of printing from impressions cut upon blocks to a greater extent, and applied it to a greater variety of purposes, than any person in Europe who had preceded him: though the merit of even this part of the art is not wholly due to himself; it had been practised in many countries for centuries, and especially in China, where it continues to the present day, with scarcely any variation or improvement.

It may be advisable to divide the history of the art into four parts:-the first embracing the

mode of striking impressions from signets, seals, and other emblems cut on wood, or other substances, the origin of which is totally lost. The second stage is that which introduces us to the name and labors of Laurence Coster, who applied block printing to the production of books, of which his Speculum humanæ Salvationis is said to be the first instance. This work consists of pictures out of the Bible, with some of the verses underneath each page, the whole being printed from a block of wood, like a wood-cut. He seems also to have had the merit of printing from separate wooden letters, cut so as to fit each other when composed together, and perhaps with the small words of most frequent use cut upon one block, to save the time and labor of the compositor. This occurred between the years 1431. and 1443. The third stage of the art was the adoption of cut metal instead of wooden letters, which is doubtless to be traced to the labors of John Geinsflesh, jun., distinguished by the name of Guttenberg. This person, with the assistance of his father, Geinsflesh the elder, invented cut metal types, and used them in printing the earliest edition of the Bible. This edition appear ed in 1450, and the completing of it took up seven or eight years. The fourth and last stage of the art, and which brought it to almost as high a state of perfection as it attained for two centuries afterwards, was the mode of casting types in mattrices, which was invented by a servant of Guttenberg's, of the name of Peter Schoeffer. For this valuable service he was admitted into the family of his master, Fust or Faustus, and was rewarded with the hand of one of his daughters. The first work printed on these improved types was the Durandi Rationale, in 1459. Most persons are acquainted with the legend of the Devil and Dr. Faustus. The origin of the tale is, that Faust carrying a parcel of his bibles to Paris, and offering them for sale as MSS., the French, upon considering the number of books, and their exact conformity with each other, even to a point, concluded that there was witchcraft in the case, and, it is said, that by either actually indicting him as a conjuror, or threatening to do so, they extorted the secret. This perhaps, however, is but a new editior of a fabulous tale; as a Dr. Faustus who had correspondence with his Satanic majesty lived at a much earlier period.

In the year 1462 the city of Mentz, where Faust had settled, was taken and plundered; and the art of printing, in the general ruin, was made public, and quickly spread itself over a great part of Europe. Harlem and Strasburg practised it very early; and whence it appears to have proceeded to Rome, to Paris, to Constantinople, and to most of the principal towns on the continent.

The date and mode of its introduction into England is a subject involved almost in as much mystery as the original invention of the art. It was an opinion regularly delivered down by our historians, that the art of printing was introduced and first practised in England by William Caxton, a mercer and citizen of London, who by his travels abroad, and a residence of many years in Holland, Flanders, and Germany, in the affairs of trade, had an opportunity of informing

himself of the whole method and progress of the art, and by the encouragement of the great, and particularly of the abbot of Westminster, first set up a press in that abbey, and began to print books soon after the year 1471. This was the tradition of our writers, till a printed book or chronicle, which had scarcely been observed by the curious, was discovered, as it is said, in the archbishop of Canterbury's Palace, with a date of its impression from Oxford, anno 1468; and was considered immediately as a clear proof and monument of the exercise of printing in that university, several years before Caxton returned from the continent.

The discovery of this book seensed at once to deprive Caxton of the glory he had long enjoyed -as the author of printing in this kingdom. Its authenticity, however, has been warmly disputed by Mr. Palmer, in his History of Printing; by Dr. Ducarvel, in his Letters to Meerman; and especially by Dr. Conyers Middleton, who maintains that there was no printing in England till the introduction of it by Caxton. Indeed, if the fact were as stated by the alleged Chronicle in the archbishop's palace, it would derogate but little from the honor of Caxton, who was certainly the first person in England who practised the art of printing with fusile types, and consequently the first who brought it to perfection: whereas Corsellis, the other claimant, printed from separate cut types in wood, that being the only method he had learnt at Harlem. Great opposition was frequently manifested by magistrates and others, when this useful art was first introduced into a new city or town. We are told, in an old pamphlet in the collection of the earl of Orford, that, when it was introduced into Norwich, a general petition was presented to the magistracy against this unnecessary innovation.

Caxton had been bred very reputably in the way of trade, and served an apprenticeship to one Robert Large a mercer; who, after having been sheriff and lord mayor of London, died in the year 1441. From the time of his master's death he spent the following thirty years beyond sea in the business of merchandise. There is no clear account left of his age: but he was certainly very old, and probably above fourscore at the time of his death. In the year 1471 he complained of the infirmities of age creeping upon him, and enfeebling his body: yet he lived twenty-three years after, and pursued his business, with extraordinary diligence, in the abbey of Westminster, till the year 1494, in which he died; not in the year following as all who write of him affirm. This appears from some verses at the end of a book, called Hilton's Scale of Perfection, printed in the same year.

Before 1465 the uniform character was the old Gothic or German; whence our black was afterwards. formed. But in that year an edition of Lactantius was printed in a kind of Semi-Gothic, of great elegance, and approaching nearly to the present Roman type; which last was first used at Rome in 1467, and soon after brought to great perfection in Italy, particularly by Jenson.

Towards the end of the fifth century, Aldus invented the Italic character which is now in use, called, from his name, Aldine or cursivus. This

sort of letter he contrived to prevent the great number of abbreviations that were then in use. The first essays in Greek that can be discovered are a few sentences which occur in the edition of Tully's Offices, 1465, at Mentz; but these were miserably incorrect and barbarous. In the the same year, 1465, was published an edition of Lactantius's Institutes, printed in monasterio Sublacensi, in the kingdom of Naples, in which the quotations from the Greek authors are printed in a very neat Greek letter. They seem to have had but a very small quantity of Greek types in the monastery; for, in the first part of the work, whenever a long sentence occurred, a blank was left, that it might be written in with a pen: after the middle of the work, however, all the Greek that occurs is printed.

In 1488, however, all former publications in this language were eclipsed by a fine edition of Homer's works at Florence, in folio, printed by Demetrius, a native of Crete. Thus printing (says Mr. Mattaire, p. 185) seems to have attained its acme of perfection, after having exhibited most beautiful specimens of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The earliest edition of the whole bible was, strictly speaking, the Complutensian Polygott of cardinal Ximenes; but as that edition, though finished in 1517, was not published till 1522, the Venetian Septuagint of 1518 may properly be called the first edition of the whole Greek Bible; Erasmus having published the New Testament only at Basil in 1516.

A very satisfactory account of Hebrew printing is thus given by Dr. Kennicott in his Annual Accounts of the Collation of Hebrew MSS., p. 112. The method which seems to have been originally observed in printing the Hebrew Bible was just what might have been expected: 1. The Pentateuch, in 1482. 2. The Prior Prophets, in 1484. 3. The Posterior Prophets, in 1486. 4. The Hagiographia, in 1487. And, after the four great parts had been thus printed separately (each with a comment), the whole text (without a comment) was printed in one volume in 1488; and the text continued to be printed, as in these first editions, so in several others for twenty or thirty years, without marginal Keri or Masora, and with greater arguments to the more ancient MSS. till about the year 1520 some of the Jews adopted later MSS. and the Masora; which absurd preference has obtained ever since.'

In 1642 a Hebrew bible was printed at Mantua under the care of the most learned Jews in Italy. This bible had not been heard of among the Christians in this country, nor perhaps in any other; though the nature of it is very extraordinary. The text indeed is nearly the same with that in other modern editions; but at the bottom of each page are various readings, amounting in the whole to above 2000, and many of them of great consequence, collected from MSS., printed editions, copies of the Talmud, and the works of the most renowned rabbies. And in one of the notes is this remark: That in several passages of the Hebrew bible the differences, are so many and so great, that they know not which to fix upon as the true readings.'

We cannot quit this subject without observing, on Dr. Kennicott's authority, that as the first

printed bibles are more correct than the latter ones; so the variations between the first edition, printed in 1488, and the edition of Vander Hooght, in 1705, at Amsterdam, in 2 vols. Eva amount upon the whole, to above 1200!

When the art of printing was first discovered, they only made use of one side of a page; they had not yet found out the expedient of impressing the other. When their editions were intended to be curious, they omitted to print the first letter of a chapter, for which they left a blank space, that it might be painted or illuminated at the option of the purchaser. Several ancient volumes of these early times have been found, where these letters are wanting, as they neglected to have them painted.

In the productions of early printing may be distinguished the various splendid editions they made of primers or prayer books. They were embellished with cuts finished in a most elegant taste: many of them were ludicrous, and several were obscene. In one of them an angel is represented crowning the Virgin Mary, and God the Father himself assisting at the cere mony. In a book of natural history the Supreme Being is represented as reading on the seventh day, when he rested from all his works.

PRACTICE OF THE ART.-The workmen employed in the art of printing are of two kinds : compositors, who range and dispose the letters into words, lines, pages, &c., according to the copy delivered to them by an author; and pressmen, who apply ink upon the same and take off the impression. In London, and other large cities and towns, these two branches are usually kept so distinct that few workmen are able to engage in both of them; and in small printingoffices, where of necessity they are alternately followed, very few men are able to attain either facility or beauty in their workmanship. The process of printing is now so common, but at the same time so diversified and peculiar, that any minuteness of description would be at once incomprehensible to those who have not seen it, and quite unnecessary to those who have. In place of any detail of this kind, we shall give some information which may be valuable to persons not immediately connected with the art; and then enumerate some of those improvements which the art of printing has received within the last few years.

As it is impossible but that in every page, almost every letter of which consists of a separate piece of metal, a number of mistakes must have been made, a sheet is first printed off, which is called a proof, and given to a person employed as a corrector; who having read and marked the errors, after these are corrected, another proofsheet is pulled, and is usually sent to the author for his revision and correction.

When the art of printing was first established it was the glory of the learned to be correctors of the press to the eminent printers. Physicians, lawyers, and bishops themselves, occupied this department. The printers then added frequently to their names those of the correctors of the press; and editions were then valued according to the abilities of the corrector. As, however, authors

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