of the imagination which touches with a golden glamour the
recovered treasures of pagan antiquity he loved as intensely as if it
were not alien and hostile, as the many thought, to that glow of
spiritual piety, that zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendor
which for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross. Humanism at
its best is ordinarily thought to be embodied in the many-sided figure
of Erasmus, with his sanity, his balance, his power to see both sides,
that of Luther and of the Church, his delicate satire, his saving humor,
his avoidance of the zealot's extremes. Perhaps a not less striking
figure is that of this much less known French printer, striving in the
midst of petty cares and unlovely sectarian strife to maintain the
stoical serenity of a Marcus Aurelius side by side with the spiritual
exaltation of a Saint Paul. There are two types of great men equally
worthy of admiration: those of unmixed and lifelong devotion to a single
aim springing from a single source, such as Aldus Manutius, and those in
whom that balance of diverse and almost contradictory elements of
character which commonly leads to weakness makes instead for strength
and for richness, for duty and delight. Such was Robert Estienne.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: FROBEN]

The third printer whom I have selected as typical of the Renaissance is
Johann Froben, of Basel. His chief distinction is that he was the
closest friend and associate of Erasmus, the principal publisher of
Erasmus's works, and the representative in the book trade of the
Erasmian attitude toward the Reformation. Although he did print the
Greek Testament, years before Estienne published his edition in Paris,
he accompanied it with no distinctively Protestant comments. Although at
one time he issued some of the earlier works of Luther, he desisted
when it became evident that Erasmus opposed any open schism in the
Church. It was Froben who gave to the world those three famous works of
Erasmus, the Encomium Moriae or Praise of Folly, the Adagia or Proverbs,
and the Colloquia or Conversations, which did quite as much as the
writings of Luther to arouse independent thinking within the Church, and
to bring to an end the last vestiges of the middle ages in church and
state. And in this relation of Froben to Erasmus there was not the mere
commercial attitude of a shrewd publisher toward a successful author
whose works became highly lucrative, but the suppo