The Aldine printing establishment was a kind of literary club-house for the finer spirits of the Republic, and Erasmus was here introduced to them all. All were interested in his work and helped him with manuscripts and suggestions; to such a degree, indeed, that this was one of the counts in Scaliger's indictment against him. Such aid may, however, easily be explained by the peculiar nature of the Adages. Every available source, written, printed, or oral, was properly laid under contribution for a work which was essentially a compilation. Of these men, none was of the first rank as a scholar; they were the fair representatives of that humanistic generation which had come into the great inheritance of culture prepared for it by two previous generations. The early original impulse with its extravagant individualism had settled down into a calmer, wider, and more polished method of thought and work. Culture had made its way into all departments of life and proved its right to exist by useful service. Of the Venetian scholars we need mention but few. Two Greeks, Marcus Musurus and Johannes Lascaris, were famous, the one as a Greek teacher, the other as the literary purveyor of Lorenzo the Magnificent and, at the time of Erasmus, as ambassador of King Louis of France to the Republic. Girolamo Aleander, then a man of twenty-eight, was preparing himself to teach Greek at Paris and, in fact, went thither in 1508 with letters of introduction from Erasmus. The two were to meet on another field when Aleander as legate of Leo X. at the court of Charles V. was to be the chief agent in the papal policy against Luther and was to reproach Erasmus in bitter terms for his half-way policy towards the Reformation. Erasmus believed that he was the author of the attacks of Scaliger, of whom he knew nothing, and says in this connection that they were co-frequenters at Aldus's and that he knew him as well as he knew himself. Everything goes to show that the nine months of the Venetian visit were months of eager work, relieved by intercourse with men of genuine culture and of unbroken friendliness. That Erasmus should have dwelt more upon the petty inconveniences of his life than upon these weightier things is quite in character. The real monument of his Venetian days is the great second edition of the Adages, in substantially their final form.