The Elzevirs did not have upon their hands the peculiar responsibilities that had to be met by the printer-publishers of the preceding generations. It was not necessary for them, as it had been for Aldus, to ransack distant convents for manuscripts, and to do the personal work of collating and preparing these manuscripts for the compositors. The Elzevirs were, in nearly every instance, in a position, for their classical publications, to give to the type dealers printed “copy,” the text of which had had the advantage of the supervision of a long series of previous editors. It was not necessary for the Elzevirs to create methods of organisation for a printing-office, or themselves to invent mechanism for the production of books. At the time their work was begun, printing was already if not a perfected at least a well developed art, the processes of which had been very fully worked out. They were able, after utilising to best advantage the experience of previous generations, so far themselves to develop and improve methods and results as to make of printing not only an art but a fine art; and even if they had never placed a publishing imprint upon a title-page, they would, through their service as typographers, have earned an honourable place in the annals of bookmaking. In their work as publishers, they had a very great advantage in doing business in a country in which literature was practically free from the burdensome interference of censorship. When we recall the long series of contests carried on by the printers of Venice and of Florence against the ecclesiastical censorship of Rome, and the almost equally hampering obstacles placed upon the printer-publishers of Paris, first by the theologians of the Sorbonne, and, later, by the officials of the Crown, we can appreciate the value of the freedom enjoyed by the Press in Leyden and in Amsterdam, in the history of publishing in which places, there is hardly a single reference to the burdens of interference or censorship.