King Francis gave evidence of an intelligent appreciation of the importance, as well for the prestige of the Crown as for the welfare of the State, of the development of learning and literature. He showed a cordial regard for the scholarly publishers and editors who were at that time gathered in Paris, and was ready in most instances to throw the influence of the Crown upon the side of a liberal standard of supervision for the productions of the Paris Press. The authority of the University, on the other hand, as expressed through the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne, was, from the time of the beginning of the Reformation, exercised persistently in behalf of a narrower and more rigorous censorship, and was used to restrict and to hamper nearly all classes of publishing undertakings. Behind the Sorbonne stood the Church of Rome. The co-operation of the Papacy with the literary spirit of the age, appears to have come to an end with the death of Leo X. His successors, Adrian VI., Clement VII., and Paul III., had learned to regard the printing-press as an efficient ally of the Reformers, and therefore as the enemy of the Church. They had convinced themselves that if the spread of pernicious doctrine among the people was to be checked, the issues of the press must be controlled by a rigorous and persistent censorship. As far as France was concerned, the persistency of the Church proved too strong to be offset by the friendly interest and rather vacillating liberalism of the Crown, and the ecclesiastical control of the printing-press became, before 1540, an established and an obstructive fact. One of the results of the antagonism of the Church to critical scholarship was to drive into the ranks of sympathisers with the Reformers, if not into Protestantism itself, very many of the scholars who were not at the outset Reformers and who were not keenly interested in the theological issues of the period, but who were naturally indignant at the reiterated interference, often on the part of very ignorant men, with scholarly undertakings. The men engaged in preparing for the public critical editions of the world’s literature, asked to be let alone, but they asked in vain.