While Plantin belongs, therefore, both chronologically and in personal prestige, rather to the second than to the first grade of the earlier printer-publishers, he is to be credited with the accomplishment of a great work, and a work carried on in the face of many difficulties, including wars, foreign and civil, the hampering censorship of the Church, the bad faith of princes, his own over-optimism, and the financial embarrassments resulting from these and from other causes. As a result of his energy, creative capacity, and persistency, he was able to overcome these serious obstacles and to impart such vitality to his concern as to secure for it a life of three centuries, the longest continued existence ever enjoyed by any publishing House. Its business, begun in 1555, came to a close only in 1867, when the city of Antwerp bought the printery in order to perpetuate its reputation through the establishing of the Plantin Museum. The chief authority on the life of Plantin and on the history of the publishing undertakings of his House, is the beautiful memorial volume by Max Rooses, published in Antwerp in 1883. The full title is given in the Bibliography. To this work I am chiefly indebted for the materials for the present chapter. Christophe Plantin was born in 1514, in a village near Tours. He died in Antwerp in 1589, continuing to the last year of his long life to be active in his business affairs. He appears to have had what to-day would be called a good school education; this included (what is to-day not so common as a result of school training) a working knowledge if not a full mastery of Latin, which, as the universal literary language of the time, was an essential part of the training of all printer-publishers. His work as a printer was begun in Paris, but when he was twenty-five years of age, he moved to Caen, in Normandy, a town which, in connection with its University, was already assuming importance as a literary and publishing centre. The printing of books in Caen had been begun by Durandas and Quijone as early as 1480, a few years after the first German printers settled at Paris. Plantin completed his apprenticeship with Macé (the second of the name) and, in 1546, married and moved to Antwerp, where he secured citizenship and became a master-printer.