us to state thy
business briefly and to take thy departure
promptly. In this way thou mayest be of service
even as was Hercules to the weary Atlas. For this
is a place of work for all who enter."

What a picture that letter gives us of the half humorous, half pathetic
spirit in which the great publisher endured the daily grind. Twenty
years of it wore him out, but his dolphin-and-anchor trade-mark still
after four centuries preaches patience and hope to all who undertake
great burdens for the enlightenment of mankind.

The Aldine press did not confine its efforts to the ancient classics,
but printed editions of Dante and Petrarch and other Italian poets, and
produced the first editions of some of the most important works of
Erasmus. But all of its publications belonged in general to the movement
known as humanism, the field of ancient and contemporary poetry, drama,
philosophy, history, and art. Aldus left to others, especially to the
great ecclesiastical printers of Venice and of Rome, the printing of the
scriptures, the works of the church fathers, and the innumerable volumes
of theological controversy with which the age abounded. In France, on
the other hand, the great publishing house of the Estiennes, or
Stephani, to whom we next direct our attention, divided its efforts
between the secular and sacred literature. Inasmuch as the history of
the Stephanus establishment is typical of the influence of printing upon
the Renaissance, and of the Renaissance upon printing, which is the
subject of this paper, we may well examine some aspects of its career.

Printing had been introduced into France in 1469 by the ecclesiastics of
the Sorbonne. Like that abbot of Subiaco who set up the first press in
Italy five years before, these professors of scholastic philosophy and
theology at Paris did not realize that the new art had in it the
possibilities of anti-clerical and heretical use. For the first
generation the French printers enjoyed a considerable freedom from
censorship and burdensome restrictions. They published, like the
Venetians, both the Greek and Latin classics and the works of
contemporary writers. Both Louis XII. and Francis I. gave their
patronage and encouragement to various eminent scholar-printers who
flourished between the establishment of the first publishing-houses in
Paris and the beginning of the sixteenth century. I pass over all these
to select as the typical Fr