THE SCHOLARS OE THE RENAISSANCE 43

power never since possessed by them. They constituted a
kind of tribunal of scholarship, criticising, discriminating,
pronouncing. Not only the “ Correctors,” drawn from all
nations, but every man employed in the printing business
had to be a scholar of refinement. It was not then as now,
when editors of the classics are innumerable; all these men
were editors for the first time, revising newly-discovered
manuscripts—which formed their main stock-in-trade. The
word “ trade ” confronts us as with a lie and should be re-
placed by Art. We of to-day can hardly imagine the
tender and reverent care with which these sixteenth-century
publishers handled the pages they were printing, chose their
paper and their type, measured their margins, spelled out
their readings. Each volume was a work of love and beauty,
brooded over, dreamed of, as if it were an artist’s creation;
and half the secret of their exquisite productions was the
number of studious men employed upon them.
The Free Press at Bale, one of the most famous of its kind,
could soon count a considerable number of rivals—foremost
among them the great Paris firm of the Estienne family.
Their house boasted three printers, Scholars of distinction,
each representing a separate generation: Henri, the founder
and the friend of Bude, doing his best work in 1500;
Robert, his son, with whom we have most to do; and Henri
the second, grandson of the first, whose masterpieces belong
to a later period. Henri. the elder had published Latin
classics; Robert Estienne was practically the first man in
France to print both Greek and Hebrew, and besides this
he was an eminent Latin grammarian. The Estiennes had
plenty of material. In the last thirty years of the fifteenth