plan of the publication might be approved by one authority while the work, when completed, might fail to secure the sanction of some other or succeeding authority. With Plantin’s _Bible_, the history took a different course. Pope Gregory XIII., who succeeded Pius V., was finally persuaded to give his approval to the work, and, in 1572, he issued a privilege for it which gave to the publisher an exclusive control for the term of twenty years, and which brought upon any reprinter excommunication and a fine of two thousand livres. When the papal sanction had been secured, the royal privilege covering all the dominions of Spain, which, after first being issued, had been withdrawn pending the papal decision, was confirmed for twenty years. Other privileges were secured as follows: From Germany, in the name of the Emperor Maximilian, for ten years; from France, in the name of King Charles IX., for twenty years; from Venice, in the name of the Doge and the Senate, for twenty years, and from Naples for twenty years. Montanus, after finishing his editorial labours and supervising the printing of the final sheets of the Bible, was obliged to devote some years to travelling from Court to Court, and to a long sojourn in Rome, in order to secure these privileges. Even after the work had secured the approval of Gregory, it was vigorously attacked by a group of the stricter Romanists, headed by Professor Leon de Castro, of Salamanca. De Castro took the ground that the Vulgate had been accepted by the Church as the authoritative text, and that all attempts to go back to the original Hebrew, Greek, or Syriac, must, therefore, be sacrilegious. As early as 1520, Noel Beda, Dean of the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne, had taken similar ground in connection with the editions of the Bible printed by Henry Estienne. Beda contended that the study of Greek and Hebrew would bring religion into peril, as it would tend to undermine the authority of the Vulgate. When Montanus, after completing his work in Antwerp, returned to Spain, he was accused of being a partisan of the Jews and an enemy of the Church, and was threatened with a trial for heresy. He was able, however, through his own scholarship and with the backing of the Pope, to hold his own against his accusers, and no formal trial ever took place. He died in Spain in 1598. He may be considered as the most distinguished of the scholarly associates of the great Antwerp publisher, his relations with whom were in many ways similar to those which had obtained half a century earlier between Erasmus and Froben of Basel.