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But oh, they are termagants in conjunction! like fiddlers who are rogues when they go single, and joined in consort, gentlemen musicianers. I care not much if I untwist my committee-man, and so give him the receipt of this grand Catholicon.
The English Catholicon was in itself a work almost equally valuable with the Promptorium; but it appears never to have attained to the currency of the Promptorium, which appeared as a printed book in 1499, while the Catholicon remained in two MSS. till printed for the Early English Text Society in 1881.
The editions of it are far fewer than those of the Catholicon; a fact which presumably points to the superiority of the later work.
We are now in a position to understand Balbi's performance in the Catholicon.
Later in the same century, the year 1483 saw the compilation of a similar, but quite independent work, which its author named the Catholicon Anglicum, that is, the English Catholicon or Universal treatise, after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of the Middle Ages, the Catholicon or Summa of Johannes de Balbis, or John of Genoa, made in 1286.
No book, however, has yet been discovered bearing the name of Gutenberg; and we can only guess what came from his press by a peculiarity of type, of which, after the first Bible, the most marked is the famous Catholicon, dated 1460 a kind of universal dictionary, the germ of all future cyclopaedias, and which became so popular that more than forty editions were printed of it in as many years.
Now, this here elixir, sold for no more than sixpence a phial, contains the essence of the alkahest, the archaeus, the catholicon, the menstruum, the sun, the moon, and, to sum up all in one word, is the true, genuine, unadulterated, unchangeable, immaculate, and specific chruseon pepuromenon ek puros." The audience were variously affected by this learned oration.
Of all the works which we have yet considered, Latin was an essential element: whether the object was, as in the glossaries and vocabularies before the fifteenth century, to explain the Latin words themselves, or as in the Promptorium and Catholicon, the Abecedarium and the Alvearie, and other works of the sixteenth century, to render English words into Latin.
And it is a great honour to the German nation that such ingenious men are to be found among them....And in the year of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year, and they began to print, and the first book they printed was the Bible in Latin: it was printed in a large character, resembling the types with which the present mass-books are printed. Gutenberg, the printer of this Bible, never mentions his own name, and the only personal note we have of his, in the colophon of the Catholicon, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of his city: 'With the aid of the Most High, who unlooses the tongues of infants and oft-times reveals to babes that which is hidden from learned men, this admirable book, the Catholicon, was finished in the year of the incarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, in the foster town of Mainz, a town of the famous German nation, which God in his clemency, by granting to it this high illumination of the mind, has preferred before the other nations of the world.
The following are the concluding verses: "But, above all, thou grand Catholicon, Or by what useful Name so'er thou'rt call'd, Thou Sweet Composer of the tortur'd Mind!
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