On les vend à Lyon en la
Maison de Françoys Juste,
Demourant devant nostre
Dame de Confort.
By bad (or good) luck this rare piece was imperfect—the back gaping and
three sheets gone. But, in turning over the leaves, I saw something that
brought my heart, as they say, into my mouth. So, beating down Bell from
his upset price of fourpence to six bawbees, I pushed the treasure
carelessly in my pocket, and never stopped till I was in a lonely place
by Tyne-side and secure from observation. Then, with my knife, I very
carefully uncased Maistre Guillaume, and extracted the sheet of
parchment, printed in black letter with red capitals, that had been used
to line the binding. A corner of it had crept out, through the injuries
of time, and on that, in Bell’s “crame” (for it is more a crame than a
shop), I had caught the mystic words Runjt macht Gunjt.
And now, I think, Monkbarns, you prick up your ears and wipe your
spectacles. That is the motto, as every one of the learned family of
antiquaries is well aware, and, as you have often told me, of your great
forbear, the venerable and praiseworthy Aldobrand Oldenbuck the
Typographer, who fled from the Low Countries during the tyrannical
attempt of Philip II. to suppress at once civil and religious liberty.
As all the world knows, he withdrew from Nuremberg to Scotland, and set
up his Penates and (what you may not hitherto have been aware of) his
Printing Press at Fairport, and under your ancestral roof of Monkbarns.
But, what will surprise you yet more, the parchment sheet which bears
Aldobrand’s motto in German contains printed matter in good Scots! This
excellent and enterprising man must have set himself to ply his noble art
in his new home, and in our unfamiliar tongue.
Yet, even now, we are not at the end of this most fortunate discovery.
It would appear that there was little demand for works of learning and
religion in Scotland, or at least at Fairport; for the parchment sheet
contains fragments of a Ballad in the Scots tongue. None but a poor and
struggling printer would then have lent his types to such work, and
fortunate for us has been the poverty of your great ancestor. Here we
have the very earliest printed ballad in the world, and, though
fragmentary, it is the more precious as the style proves to
demonstration, and against the frantic scepticism even of a Ritson, the
antique and venerable character of those compositions. I send you a copy
of the Ballad, with the gaps (where the tooth of time or of the worm,
_edax rerum_, hath impaired it) filled up with conjectural restorations
of my own. But how far do they fall short of the original simplicity!
_Non cuivis contingit_. As the title is lacking, as well as the imprint,
I have styled it