time to time, here as
everywhere, fought for supremacy. Outbursts of civil war, excited by
vanity or interest, and in which the victory remained sometimes with the
patricians, sometimes with the burgesses, and at others with the
artisans, made them alternately victors, conquered, and proscribed. This
is the history of all cities, of all republics, and of all empires.
Mainz, was a miniature of Rome or Athens, only the proscribed party had
not the sea to cross to escape from their country; they went outside the
walls, and crossed the Rhine; those of Strasburg going to Mainz, and
those of Mainz to Strasburg, to wait until their party recovered power,
or until they were recalled by their fellow-citizens.

In these intestine struggles of Mainz, the young Gutenberg, himself a
gentleman, and naturally fighting for the cause most holy in a son's
eyes--that of his father--was defeated by the burgesses, and banished,
with all the knights of his family, from the territory of Mainz. His
mother and sisters alone remained there in possession of their property,
as innocent victims on whom the faults of the nobility should not be
visited. His first banishment was short, and peace was ratified by the
return of the refugees. A vain quarrel about precedence in the public
ceremonies on the occasion of the solemn entry of the Emperor Robert,
accompanied by the Archbishop Conrad, into Mainz, refreshed the
animosity of the two classes in 1420, and young Gutenberg, at the age of
nineteen, under went his second exile.

The free city of Frankfort now offered itself as a mediator between the
nobles and plebeians of Mainz, and procured their recall on condition of
the governing magistracy being equally shared between the high classes
and the burgesses. But Gutenberg, whether his valor in the civil war had
rendered him more obnoxious and more hostile to the burgesses; whether
his pride, fostered by the traditions of his race, could not submit
patiently to an equality with plebeians; or whether, more probably, ten
years of exile and study at Strasburg had already turned the bent of his
thoughts to a nobler subject than the vain honors of a free city,
refused to return to his country. His mother, who watched over her
son's interest at Mainz, petitioned the republic to allow him to receive
as a pension a small portion of the revenues of his confiscated
possessions. The republic replied that the young patrician's refusal to
return to his country was