After Henri's death his business was for a time carried on by his widow's second husband, Simon Colines, a scholar and humanist of brilliant attainments. Both while at the head of the house of Stephanus and later when he had withdrawn from that in favor of Robert Estienne his stepson and set up a separate publishing business, Colines added much to the prestige of French printing. He caused Greek fonts to be cast, not inferior to those of the Venetian printers, and began to publish the Greek classics in beautiful editions. It was Colines, rather than either the elder or the younger Estienne, who elevated the artistic side of French printing by engaging the services of such famous typographical experts as Geofroy Tory, and adding to his books illustrations of the highest excellence, as well as decorative initials and borders. Indeed it may be said that after the death of Aldus supremacy in the fine art of book-making gradually passed from Venice to Paris.
The greatest of the Estiennes was Robert, son of Henri Estienne and stepson of Colines, who was in control of the house from 1524 to his death in 1559. The very first book he published was an edition of the Latin Testament. Although following in the main the Vulgate or official Bible of the Roman Church, he introduced certain corrections based on his knowledge of the Greek text. This marked 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 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.
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 support by one enlightened scholar who happened to be in a profitable business of another who happened to be out of it. The earlier life of Erasmus exhibits a rather depressing illustration of the humiliations to which professional scholars were exposed in trying to get a living from the pensions and benefactions of the idle rich. Literary patronage, as it existed from the days of Horace and Maecenas down to the death-blow which Dr. Johnson gave it in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, has never helped the independence or the self-respect of scholars and poets. It was Froben's peculiar good fortune to be able to employ, on a business basis with a regular salary, the greatest scholar of the age as one of his editors and literary advisers, and at the same time enable him to preserve his independence of thought and of action. Aldus and the French publishers had gathered about them professional scholars and experts for the execution of specific tasks at the market price, supplemented often by generous private hospitality. That was good; but far better was Froben's relation with his friend, his intellectual master, and his profitable client Erasmus. In an age when no copyright laws existed for the author's benefit the works of Erasmus were shamelessly pirated in editions, published in Germany and France, from which the author received not a penny. Yet Froben went right on paying to Erasmus not only the fixed annual salary as a member of his consulting staff but also a generous share of the profits upon his books. In a greedy, unscrupulous, and rapacious age this wise and just, not to say generous, policy stands out as prophetic of a better time.