In the edition of _Horace_ prepared by Lambinus, the editor says, in the epistle dedicatory addressed to Charles IX.: “The University of Paris was then [in the time of Francis] equally destitute of sound philosophy and of elegant learning. The poets, historians, and philosophers of ancient Greece were scarcely known by name, and ... scarcely a single professor was acquainted with even the rudiments of Greek or Hebrew, or was capable of teaching Latin in its genuine purity.” Erasmus writes, in 1529, to some friends in the _Collége Royal_, encouraging them to persevere in their efforts to raise the standard of liberal scholarship in France, and referring to the progress of the College of Louvain, which had recently been instituted through the munificence of Busleiden, a simple canon of Brussels, and for the general organisation of which Erasmus was largely responsible. The original purpose of the college (which became, in the next century, a headquarters for Catholic theology) was the prosecution of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. It was in connection with the _Collége Royal_, and as, in fact, an essential part of his great scheme for the development of higher education, that King Francis instituted the _Imprimerie Royale_, with its appendage of _Typographus Regius_, an arrangement which was at the time unprecedented in the annals of literature. “By an apparatus which nothing less than princely munificence could have provided,” says Greswell, “the admirable productions of classic genius and taste, and particularly those of Greece, were now to be given to the public with a beauty of characters and an exquisiteness of technical perfection to which no typographer had ever yet attained or even in imagination aspired.”[15] The fonts of Greek type which came later to be known as _Characteres Regii_, were cast under the direction of Claude Garamond, from designs furnished by Angelus Vergetius, of Candia, whose Greek penmanship was so singularly beautiful as to have been selected as the pattern for Garamond to follow. Vergetius was appointed by the King to a post in the new college, as the King’s _Escrivain en Grecque_, with a stipend equal to that of the professors.