d the beginning of a long
controversy between Estienne and the orthodox divines of the Sorbonne,
which lasted almost throughout his life. In following years he published
many editions of the Latin scriptures, each time with additional
corrections, and eventually with his own notes and comments, in some
cases attacking the received doctrines of the Church. A Hebrew Old
Testament, in 1546, was followed in 1550 by the Greek New Testament. The
next year he published a new edition of the Testament in which for the
first time it was divided into verses, a precedent followed in Bible
printing ever since. It was not merely the fact of his printing the
scriptures at all that angered the heresy-hunters, but much more
Estienne's notes and comments, in which, like Luther in Germany and
Tyndale in England, he sided with the views of the Reformers.

What distinguishes Robert Estienne from the ordinary Protestant scholars
and publishers of his time is the fact that he was not only a Reformer
but a humanist of broad and tolerant culture. In all the illustrious
group of that age there is scarcely another like him in this union of
religious zeal and of scholarly culture. Luther and Calvin and Tyndale
had the one; Erasmus is the most eminent example of the other, with such
great publishers as Aldus and Froben his worthy supporters. But Robert
Estienne, alongside of his controversial works and Biblical texts,
labored at such great enterprises as his monumental edition of Terence,
in which he corrected by the soundest methods of textual criticism no
less than six thousand errors in the received text, and especially his
magnificent lexicons of the Latin and Greek languages, which set the
standard for all other lexicographers for generations to come.

The middle of the sixteenth century in France is thus marked by a
curious blend of those two distinct movements in human history which we
call the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the blend is nowhere more
picturesque than in the life of Robert Estienne. At one moment we find
him attacking the abuses of the church, at another we find him
consulting with Claude Garamond upon the design of a new Greek type, or
reading the final proofs of an edition of Horace or Catullus or Juvenal,
or discussing with some wealthy and noble book-collector like the famous
Grolier the latest styles in elegant bindings and gold-stamped
decoration. For beauty and for truth he had an equal passion. All that
romance