gloires de la France,' at Versailles, at an expense little short of half a million, from his own purse, contributed thirty-three pictures to the Louvre.

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Meanwhile it is difficult now to realise the fact that, with all the real accommodation of this enormous palace, and the boasted better management of the French in such matters, the exhibition of modern painters annually hid the old masters from sight, and inflicted upon them grievous injuries, down to so late a date as 1849. It would seem, indeed, as if republics were enlightened in their estimate of such treasures than other forms of government, for, with the new powers of 1848, a greatly improved arrangement of the gallery took place. The first edition of the admirable catalogue by M. Villot, from the thirteenth edition of which we have borrowed so largely, was given to the public; and, above all, the periodical eclipse of the old constellations by the grosser bodies of modern creation was entirely abolished.

A Murillo has been.

Here our task must cease. The present Administration has been alternately stingy and extravagant. purchased at the price of a gallery; and an indifferent gallery as regards pictures-the Campana-has swallowed up the average art resources of a long reign. To the last also we find the history of the collections running parallel with that of the country in general. In 1848 they became again the property of the people; now, following the course of events, they have been claimed as the appanage of the Crown. But if a despotic sovereign has made the price and the choice of works of art subservient to his own policy, he has given them, in the completion of the building of the Louvre, a framework which is the admiration of the world. As far, however, as regards the accommodation of pictures, it is by no means so perfect as could be wished. Let us hope that in this respect the English nation may yet boast a better Louvre of their own.

ART. II.-1. Caractères et Portraits Littéraires du XVI. Siècle. Par M. Léon Feugère. Second Edition. 2 tomes. Paris, 1864. 2. Histoire du Livre en France. Par Edmond Werdet. Зе partie, tome 1er. Les Estienne et leurs Devanciers depuis 1470. Paris, 1864.

HE

ENRI ESTIENNE, on his death in 1598, found no one in the circle of his family or friends to record his personal adventures, or to enumerate, in even the barest memoir, his learned labours. Not till near a century afterwards did the

literary

literary history of the sixteenth century become the object of curiosity; and this not in France itself. Catholic France, divided between dreams of military glory without and theological dispute within, had no leisure for its own history. The taste and temper of the age of Louis XIV. were as alien from those of France of the sixteenth century as if they had belonged to two different peoples and countries. The memory of its great Protestant worthies was left to be cultivated by the refugees in England, Prussia, or the Low Countries. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes exiled not only the best living heads and hands of France, but all the associations and traditions of the sixteenth century with them.

The Stephenses (Fr. Estienne) found their first biographer in Theodore Janssen ab Almeloveen. The Latin dissertation De Vitis Stephanorum' of this laborious Dutch compiler was published at Amsterdam in 1683. Almeloveen had no traditional materials or family papers, and worked merely from printed sources. But it so happens that in the case of Henri Estienne these printed memoranda are more than usually abundant. During threescore and two years of restless, nay, feverish activity, Henri's press had never ceased to issue a stream of publications classical or fugitive, all superintended by himself, many his own composition. Few of these want a Preface, Dedication, Preliminary Epistle, or Monition of the publisher, in which the feelings of the hour, his own affairs, his reasons for writing, or what had hindered him from writing, are poured forth with a garrulous egotism which is anything but eloquent or refined. But what these confidences want in taste they offer in genuineness. And being but occasional outbursts, they offer glimpses of a personal history which they do not reveal. They are the very material which at once attract and baffle a biographer.

After an interval of twenty-five years the same mine was worked with more perseverance and on a more extensive scale by Michel Maittaire, a French Protestant refugee, naturalised in England, whose original name had been Mettayer. But though Maittaire had himself suffered for religion, he knew scarcely anything of the religious antecedents of the Protestant Church. It is enough to mention two facts:-1. Maittaire brought out an edition of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum' as the serious productions of their imputed authors; and 2. In his Lives of the Stephenses he supposes Henri's books with the olive' to have been printed at Paris,-a blunder almost incredible in a bibliographer, though Maittaire has been followed in it by the compilers of the last-printed Bodleian Catalogue.

Passing over Mr. Gresswell's Parisian Greek Press,' which

is

is only an abstract of Maittaire, we come to the first work which the French dedicated to this truly national subject. The Annales de l'Imprimerie des Estienne,' in its second and improved edition, (Paris, 1843), if not exactly a model of bibliophilic accuracy, is yet, perhaps, one of the best specimens of this kind of industry which France has to show. But there was wanting a review of the higher learning in France during the sixteenth century: a field entirely forsaken by the French critics, who have been so profuse in disserting upon the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries.

With this view the Académie Française proposed for the year 1854, as one of their prize subjects a Life of Henri Estienne.' The production of M. Feugère, which is now reprinted by him in the collected volumes of his Essays which we have placed at the head of this paper, was thought deserving of the prize. As such, it is necessarily a neat piece of composition. And this is all that can be said of it. M. Feugère is indebted, almost wholly, to Rénouard's 'Annales' for his facts. He omits many, tells the rest more diffusely, and interweaves the ordinary reflections of a man of sense and some reading, but of no special intimacy with the period. We shall show below, in one signal instance, that he has not even looked beyond the title-page of some books of which he yet offers a detailed criticism. But M. Feugère's most decisive disqualification for historiographer of the Estienne is his imperfect knowledge of Greek. When M. Rénouard tells us that Jos. Scaliger ne voyoit pas sans dépit la supériorité de Henri Etienne,' we smile at the sincerity with which the estimable printer utters this absurdity. When M. Feugère, however, in an essay which has received the high sanction of the Académie Française, is equally unable to discriminate between white and black in classical philology, we are forcibly reminded of the absence of the highest element of cultivation from the education of the leading nation of Europe. If the French Academy regard the production of a good French exercise as the object of their annual competition, they are right in conferring the crown on such essays as this of M. Feugère. As tending to maintain historical criticism in France at its present superficial level, it can but be matter of regret that the Academy should sanction with its approbation so feeble and secondhand a reproduction.

If the decision be a bad one, the thesis was an excellent one to set. A brief outline of the fortunes of the Press of the Stephenses may serve to show what vital points of the national life are involved in the subject proposed by the Academy 'In narrating

the

the lives of the Estienne,' says M. Feugère, 'biography rises to the elevation of history.'

The family of the Estienne is found settled at Paris in 1502 in the person of Henri I. of that name, the founder of this dynasty of letters. He carried on the business of a printer and bookseller with great success and credit for twenty years. He published on his own account 118 different works, nearly all theological, liturgical, or scholastic; hardly anything relating to the new studies, to which the impulse was scarcely yet given in France. Henri left his foreman Simon de Colines the guardian of his children and his executor. Simon, whose surname does not denote nobility, but only that his native place was the little village of Colinée, in Brittany, married the widow 'afin de s'éviter l'embarras d'une liquidation' ('Bulletin du Bouquiniste,' No. 69). The peaceful and prosperous diligence of these twenty years, in which the [foundations of the family renown were laid and its character acquired, stand in strong contrast to the adventurous and troubled lives of the son and the grandson, in which so much glory was gained and so much misery endured.

Robert I., eldest son of Henri I., is found in possession of the paternal establishment in 1526. It was in the quarter of the University, in the street St. Jean de Beauvais. The door was marked by the ensign which the father had adopted, and which the son and grandson made famous—an olive-tree, with spreading boughs. The same tree, with the motto 'Noli altum sapere sed time' (Rom. xi. 20), was taken by Robert for his printer's mark. Not only the custom of the trade, but the law with its terrible penalties, required every printer to affix his mark to every publication. As late as 1650 the olive-tree was still over the door of the same house, though now passed into different hands. So at Bologna the Aldine anchor was still to be seen upon the house of Antonio Manutio as late as the beginning of the present century, when it was bought as a relic by an Englishman. Robert I. married a daughter of Josse Bade. Bade, the friend of Erasmus, better known in literary history as Badius Ascensius (i. e. of Asch, a village in Flanders), was himself a learned printer, and his three daughters married printers. Perrette-that was the name of the daughter who fell to the share of Robert Estiennewas a woman of sense, and who had enjoyed that masculine education which the Reformation introduced for women, and which it was the first care of the Catholic reaction to crush. Nothing more is known of Perrette than the following casual notice, written

by

by her son many years after her death. Addressing his own son Paul in 1585, Henri says:

"And as I am on the topic of speaking Latin, I will add another notable reminiscence of my father's family, by the which thou mayst understand the facilities I enjoyed as a boy for acquiring that tongue. There was a time when thy grandfather Robert entertained in his own household ten men employed by him as correctors on his press, or in other' parts of his business. These ten persons, all of them men of education; some of them were of considerable learning; as they were of different nations, so they were of different languages. This necessitated them to employ Latin as the common medium of communication, not at table only, but about the house, so that the very maidservants came to understand what was said, and even to speak it a little. As for your grandmother Perrette, except one made use of some very unusual word, she understood what was said in Latin with the same ease as if it had been French. As to myself and my brother Robert, we were allowed at home to use no other language whenever we had to address my father, or one of his ten journeymen.'-Dedication to Aulus Gellius,' 1585.

This is a glimpse, and the only one we can catch, of the interior of Robert's household. Of the amount of his professional labour, only a study of the bibliographical lists can convey an idea. From 1526 to 1559, when he died, a space of thirty-three years, not a year elapses in which he does not turn out several volumes, some of them chefs-d'œuvre of art, all of them far surpassing anything that had been before seen in France. Sometimes it is a pocket Greek Testament in mignon letters, yet as clear as the largest pica; sometimes a Bible in 3 massive folios, with notes and various readings; sometimes an 'editio princeps of a Greek classic, or an entirely new Latin Lexicon. With respect to most of these publications, it must be remembered that the modest notice on the title, 'Parisiis, Robertus Stephanus,' conceals, instead of proclaims, the part that ought to be credited to himself. He was at once printer, corrector, publisher, author. Indeed, these functions were at that time neither separate nor separable. Take, for example, his great Latin Dictionary. In its origin this was nothing but a reprint of 'Calepinus,' the 'Ainsworth' of schoolboys in the first half of the sixteenth century. 'Calepin' had long been common property, and in 1531 Robert designed a reprint of it in the way of trade-schoolbooks being then, as now, one of the most lucrative employments of booksellers' capital. In refitting it for press, however, Robert made so many improvements and additions, that he felt himself warranted in suppressing the name of brother Ambrogio of Calepio, and substituting his own. Instead of publisher of a

reprint