picture of the Renaissance.

[Illustration]

First of all, in our consideration and in order of greatness, stands the
name of Aldus Manutius. The books of the Aldine press, all with the
well-known sign of the anchor and dolphin, are familiar to most students
of the classics. Aldus was born in 1450, the very year of Gutenberg's
invention. For the first forty years of his life he was a scholar,
devoting himself to the Latin classics and to the mastery of the newly
revived Greek language and literature. His intimate association with
Pico della Mirandola and other Italian scholars, as well as with many
of the learned Greeks who then frequented Italian courts and cities, led
him to conceive the great plan upon which his later career was based.
This was nothing less than to issue practically the whole body of
classic literature, Greek as well as Latin, in editions distinguished
from all that had preceded in two important respects. First, they were
to be not reprints of received uncritical texts but new revisions made
by competent scholars based upon a comparison of all the best available
manuscripts. Secondly, they were to be printed not in ponderous and
costly folios but in small octavos of convenient size, small but clear
type, and low price. This was not primarily a commercial venture like
the cheap texts of the classics issued in the nineteenth century by
Teubner and other German publishers, but resembled rather in its broad
humanistic spirit such a recent enterprise as the Loeb Classical
Library. The purpose in each case was to revive and encourage the
reading of the classics not alone by schoolboys but by men of all ages
and all professions. But there is this important difference, that Mr.
Loeb is a retired millionaire who employs scholars to do all the work
and merely foots the bill, while Aldus was a poor man dependent upon
such capital as he could borrow from his patrons, and had at the same
time to perform for himself a large part of the editorial labors on his
books. Mr. Loeb commands the latest and most complete resources of the
modern art of printing; Aldus helped to make that art. Mr. Loeb's
editors may employ when they choose the style of type known as italic;
Aldus invented it. Mr. Loeb's publishers have at their command all the
advertising and selling machinery of a great modern business concern,
and yet they do not, and probably can not, make the classics pay for
themselves, but must meet the defic