The exceptional personal erudition of Robert Estienne, the distinctive importance of his publishing undertakings, the zeal evinced by him from the beginning of his career for the advancement of learning and for critical scholarship, and the courageous fight made by him against the assumption of the bigoted divines of the Sorbonne of the right to exercise censorship over a literature of the very language of which they were for the most part ignorant, constitute the grounds for my selection of him as the most worthy representative of the printer-publishers of France of the sixteenth century, and for presenting with some little detail the chief incidents of his career. While the early memoirs give pretty full information concerning the literary side of Estienne’s publishing undertakings and present also the history of his long series of contests in behalf of the freedom of the Press, the records of the business details of his enterprises are scanty and inadequate. We have no such information as has been preserved in the account books of Aldus, Koberger, and Plantin, showing the cost of the production of his books, or the amounts paid to editors and authors. The extent of the financial aid extended to Robert by the wise liberality of King Francis is also not clearly specified, although we can realise how important in many ways this royal assistance must have been, and especially in connection with the use of the great fonts of Greek type for the making of which the King had paid. We know that he was the only one of the pioneer printers who secured any intelligent and effective co-operation from a royal treasury, and we know also that important as this co-operation was, it was in the end more than offset by the disastrous antagonism of the ecclesiastics of the Sorbonne, whose persistency finally triumphed over both king and printer.