General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: T. Whittaker Subjects: Fiction / General Humor / Form / Essays Literary Collections / Essays Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: BOOK CRAFT. Mightiest of the mighty means, On which the arm of Projreas leans – Han’s noblest mission to advance, His woes assuage, his weal enhance, His rights enforce, his wrongs redress – Mightiest of the mighty la the /Vw / – The invention of the
art preservative of arts
– Printing, like the faculty of speech, seems to have come to us
like a divine revelation in the history of man !
We ask –
Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise, Of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes ?
Yet no oracle is responsive to the inquiry; and all we know is, that the Decalogue was written upon stone tablets, and that picture-writing or hieroglyphs were in use among the earliest races of mankind. This fact is abundantly indicated by the inscriptions and sculptured stones which everywhere abound amid the ruins, recently exhumed, of Babylon, Phoenicia, Chaldea, Egypt, Arabia, and India. Much learned discussion has been devoted to the subject of alphabetical writing, also; there can be little doubt, however, of its being of Divine origin. Seven cities of classic Greece, it will be remembered, contended for the honor of being the birth-place of Homer; and the contest for the honor of giving birth to a discovery, the greatest in the history of the arts of life, is also stoutly contended for, by three of the cities of Continental Europe – Haarlem, Mentz, and Frankfort. These rival cities stand like armed champions, challenging each for the prize. Haarlem has erected …