The Aldine press did not confine its efforts to the ancient classics, but printed editions of Dante and Petrarch and other Italian poets, and produced the first editions of some of the most important works of Erasmus. But all of its publications belonged in general to the movement known as humanism, the field of ancient and contemporary poetry, drama, philosophy, history, and art. Aldus left to others, especially to the great ecclesiastical printers of Venice and of Rome, the printing of the scriptures, the works of the church fathers, and the innumerable volumes of theological controversy with which the age abounded. In France, on the other hand, the great publishing house of the Estiennes, or Stephani, to whom we next direct our attention, divided its efforts between the secular and sacred literature. Inasmuch as the history of the Stephanus establishment is typical of the influence of printing upon the Renaissance, and of the Renaissance upon printing, which is the subject of this paper, we may well examine some aspects of its career. Printing had been introduced into France in 1469 by the ecclesiastics of the Sorbonne. Like that abbot of Subiaco who set up the first press in Italy five years before, these professors of scholastic philosophy and theology at Paris did not realize that the new art had in it the possibilities of anti-clerical and heretical use. For the first generation the French printers enjoyed a considerable freedom from censorship and burdensome restrictions. They published, like the Venetians, both the Greek and Latin classics and the works of contemporary writers. Both Louis XII. and Francis I. gave their patronage and encouragement to various eminent scholar-printers who flourished between the establishment of the first publishing-houses in Paris and the beginning of the sixteenth century. I pass over all these to select as the typical French printers of the Renaissance the family founded by Henri Estienne the elder. His first book, a Latin translation of Aristotle's Ethica, appeared in 1504. From that date for nearly a hundred years the house of Stephanus and his descendants led the publishing business in France. Both in the artistic advancement of the art of printing and in the intellectual advancement of French thought by their selection of the works to be issued they earned a right to the enduring gratitude of mankind. Henri Estienne, the founder of the house, who died in 1520, had published during these sixteen years at least one hundred separate works. Although they were mostly Latin, many of them revealed Estienne's knowledge of and devotion to the new Greek studies, and this tendency on his part was at once suspected as heretical by the orthodox doctors of the Sorbonne. The favor of King Francis was not at all times sufficient to protect him from persecution, and an increasing severity of censorship arose, the full force of which began to be evident in the time of his son Robert.