either commercial or literary.[132] Lipsius, writing to Montanus (while Plantin was still active), says: _Si la race de Plantin venait à faillir, je ne croirais plus à personne au monde; l’amour et confiance que l’auteur de la ligne m’a inspirée, je les transporte sur tous ses proches_. After the death of the publisher, Lipsius speaks of him as _l’ami qu’il avait aimé et qui l’avait aimé plus fidèlement que personne_. Plantin read, wrote, and spoke French, Spanish, German, Flemish, and Latin, and had some knowledge of English and Italian. While making no claim to scholarship, he had scholarly tastes and ideals, and he knew how to select scholars as associates and workers in the undertakings planned by him. He may also be classed with the artists. In the sixteenth century, typography was a liberal art, and Plantin was in typography an artist and a liberal artist. He was, further, also the first publisher to associate with typography on any large scale the work of the engraver, and the series of copper plates produced under his direction for his great series of illustrated works, constituted an enormous advance in artistic publishing. While Plantin cannot take rank with Aldus as a great man, he may fairly be described as a great publisher. He possessed imagination, courage, high ideals, and public spirit, and he showed himself not infrequently more ambitious to do important work for literature than to amass wealth. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. THE ELZEVIRS OF LEYDEN AND AMSTERDAM. 1587-1688. THE name of Elzevir has for more than two centuries been a familiar one to collectors of choice books. These Dutch printer-publishers of the seventeenth century were able to associate their imprint with certain publications of such distinctive typographical excellence as to ensure for the editions known as “Elzevirs” a prestige that has endured to the present day. Aldus alone among the early publishers has had a similar fortune, and while the “Aldine” editions are, of course, in respect to their number and to their typographical excellence, much less important than the “Elzevirs,” it must be remembered that having been issued more than a century earlier, their production called for a much larger measure of originating capacity and initiative on the part of their printer-publisher. The principal authority on the history of the Elzevirs is a comprehensive and carefully written monograph of Alphonse Willems, published in Brussels in 1880.