Aldus Manutius, who led the revolution, has often been wrongly praised. He can hardly be called a great printer. He burdened Greek scholarship for three centuries with a thoroughly bad style in Greek types, and the cursive substitute which he provided for the fine roman founts for which Italy had been famous almost drove them from the field. Both the Greek type and the italics were the outcome of confused thinking. They were based upon styles of handwriting which Aldus and his scholarly friends doubtless found more expeditious than the formal book-hands which had previously been in use. Quickness in writing is an excellent thing. But a sloping type takes just as long to set up as an upright one, and absolutely nothing is gained by the substitution of an imitation of a quicker hand for the imitation of a slower one. Aldus had begun publishing at Venice early in 1495[43] with an edition of the Greek grammar of Lascaris, an earlier edition of which, issued at Milan in 1476, had been the first book wholly in Greek to obtain the honour of print. The Idylls of Theocritus and the poem of Hesiod called _Works and Days_ had been printed at the same place in 1479 and a Greek Psalter in 1487. At Florence the famous first edition of Homer was printed (by Bartolommeo Libri) in 1488, and was followed in the years 1494-6 (i.e. about the time that Aldus began work) by five books printed entirely in majuscules on the model of the letters used in inscriptions. Among these books were the Greek Anthology, four plays of Euripides, and an Apollonius Rhodius. The printing of the Greek classics had thus made a start, although a slow one. Aldus now greatly quickened the pace, producing his great Aristotle in four (or, as it is sometimes reckoned, five) volumes, between the years 1495 and 1498, and following it up with nine comedies of Aristophanes in 1498, Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus in 1502, Xenophon's _Hellenics_, and the plays of Euripides in 1503 and Demosthenes in 1504. The service which he thus rendered to Greek scholarship was incalculable, but it was accompanied by a very serious drawback, the evil effects of which lasted for nearly three centuries. The Greek quotations in many books printed in Italy before this time had been printed in types imitating the writing in fairly old Greek manuscripts, handsome in appearance and fairly free from contractions; Aldus is said to have taken as his model the handwriting of his friend Marcus Musurus, with all its crabbed and often fantastic ligatures, and the simplicity of the Greek alphabet was thus intolerably complicated.