Casaubon tells us that the ministers of Geneva exercised a strict surveillance over the teaching both of the scholar and of the Academy, and that a professor in the latter could not even publish without first submitting his book to the censorship of divines. It seems probable that the Calvinistic scrutiny in Geneva may easily have been in its narrowness and in its persistency a more serious obstacle during the last ten years of the sixteenth century, in the way of publishing and literary undertakings, than the censorship of the Catholic theologians of Paris. It is the conclusion of Pattison (which is not in harmony with the earlier descriptions of the intellectual activities of Geneva) that during the term of Casaubon’s work there existed in the town nothing that could properly be called a literary interest. There was a poor and starved seminary for pious instruction; an academic printing-press devoted to the production of sermons and text-books; a theology not formal or nominal, but interfused throughout the life and the thought of each day. An armed enemy crouched at the gates of the city, watching his opportunity for the death spring; while each week brought news of some fresh outrage on believers with whom Geneva was in sympathy in the countries where the Catholic reaction was in its full tide. On this ungenial soil, Casaubon developed out of his own instincts the true ideal of classical learning. Not a scheme of philology, as we now conceive it, but the idea of a complete mastery, by exhaustive reading, of the thought of the ancient world, a reconstruction of Greek and Roman antiquity out of the extant remains of the literature.[37] Casaubon’s first literary work of importance, the _Animadversiones_ on Athenæus, was printed at Lyons in the year 1600. He was at the time occupying a Chair in the Protestant University of Montpellier, but there was no press in Montpellier with facilities for printing Greek text. In fact, the printing of books in the city appears to have begun only in 1597. Seventy years earlier, Rabelais had been obliged to have printed at Lyons his edition of the _Hypocratic Aphorisms_. Casaubon endeavoured to induce a Geneva printer to establish in Montpellier a Press with a Greek font and a skilled corrector, but the business connected with the little University did not offer sufficient encouragement for the undertaking. It may be remembered that Oxford did not possess any Greek type until 1586, and that Greek was first printed in Cambridge some years later. Pattison is of opinion that there was probably at the time a Greek Press at Toulouse, but no heretic could print or even sojourn in this city of fanatical Romanism, a city in which even the edict of toleration could never be put in force.