Previous to Ximenes, however, the famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius had conceived the idea of such a Polyglot. In the Preface to his undated Greek Psalter (_circa_ 1497), a triglot Bible was promised. Of this he was reminded from London by Grocyn on the 6th October 1499. On the 9th July 1501 he wrote about it to the German humanist Conrad Celtes, to whom he sent the first specimen page on the 3rd September of the same year. (Facsimile in Renouard, _L’Imprimerie des Aldes_^{2, 3}.) Still earlier, the Magnificat and the Benedictus[3] had been printed among the hymns at the end of the Greek Psalter (Milan, 1481; Venice, 1486). These were the first portions of the Greek New Testament to be printed, while the first printed in Germany appeared at Erfurt in 1501-2. The first edition of the Greek New Testament for sale was Erasmus’s edition of 1516. LITERATURE.—On Aldus, see Nestle, _Septuagintastudien_, i. 2; ii. 11. On Aldus’s well-known device, the anchor and dolphin, see Léon Dorez, _Études Aldines_, Revue des bibliothèques, vi. (1896), part 5-6, p. 143 ff.; part 7-9; also J. R. Harris, _The Homeric Centones_, London, 1898, p. 24. The device is emblematic of the favourite motto of Augustus and Titus, ἀεὶ σπεῦδε βραδέως, Semper festina lente. [Sidenote: Erasmus, 1516.] 2. Froben, the printer of Basel, was anxious to forestall the costly edition of the Spanish Cardinal, and with this object appealed on the 15th March 1515 to the famous humanist Desiderius ERASMUS (1467-1536), then in England. His edition appeared as early as the 1st March 1516, and was dedicated on the 1st February to Pope Leo. The printing was begun in the previous September, and was partly superintended by Zwingli’s friend, John Oecolampadius of Weinsberg. Erasmus himself confessed afterwards that his New Testament was “præcipitatum verius quam editum,” though he boasted that he had employed in its preparation not any sort of manuscripts, but the oldest and most correct copies.[4] As early as 1734, J. A. Bengel recognised that in the Apocalypse Erasmus must have used only one manuscript, and that partly mutilated, so that he was unable to read it correctly and was obliged to supply its lacunæ by means of a retranslation from the Latin into Greek. And this conclusion was confirmed in 1861 by the rediscovery of that very manuscript by Franz Delitzsch in the Oettingen-Wallerstein Library at Mayhingen.[5] In a parallel column Erasmus gave a translation of the Greek into elegant Latin. The Emperor protected the edition for four years by copyright, but as early as February 1518 it was reprinted by Aldus Manutius in his Greek Bible. It was sanctioned by the Pope on the 10th September 1518. Four successive editions were afterwards prepared by Erasmus: the second in 1519, the third in 1522, the fourth (improved) in 1527, and the fifth in 1535.