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.
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