The superintendence of this large establishment, added to the anxieties attending the production of so many books as yet not edited, sorely taxed the health and powers of Aldo. For years together he seems to have had no minute he could call his own. Continual demands were made by visitors and strangers upon his hours of leisure; and in order to secure time for the conduct of his business, he was forced to placard his door with a prohibitory notice.[348] Besides the more ordinary interruptions, to which every man of eminence is subjected, he had to struggle with peculiar difficulties due to the novelty of his undertaking. The prefaces to many of his publications contain allusions to strikes among his workmen,[349] to the piracies of rival booksellers,[350] to the difficulty of procuring authentic MSS.,[351] and to the interruptions caused by war. Twice was the work of printing suspended, first in 1506, and then again in 1510. For two whole years at the latter period the industries of Venice were paralysed by the allied forces of the League of Cambray. The dedication of the first edition of Plato, 1513, to Leo X. concludes with a prayer, splendid in the earnestness and simplicity of its eloquence, wherein Aldo compares the miseries of warfare and the woes of Italy with the sublime and peaceful objects of the student. All the terrible experiences of that wasteful campaign, from the effects of which the Republic of Venice never wholly recovered, seem to find expression in the passionate but reverent, address of the great printer to the scholar Pope. For two years previously the press of Aldo had been idle, while the French were deluging Brescia with blood, and the plains of Ravenna were heaped with dead Italians, Spaniards, Gauls, and Germans, met in passionate but fruitless conflict by the Ronco. Now, from the midst of her desolated palaces and silenced lagoons, Venice stretched forth to Europe the peace-gift of Plato. The student who had toiled to make it perfect, appealed before Christ and His vicar, from the arms that brutalise to the arts that humanise the nations. [Footnote 348: See Didot's _Alde Manuce_, p. 417, the passage beginning 'Vix credas.' In the Latin preface to the _Thesaurus Cornucopiæ et Horti Adonidis_, 1495, Aldo complains that he has not been able to rest for one hour during seven years.] [Footnote 349: 'Tot illico oborta sunt impedimenta malorumque invidiâ et domesticorum [Greek: kai tais tôn kataratôn kai drapeteuontôn doulôn epiboulais].' Preface to the _Poetæ Christiani Veteres_, 1501. Again in the 'monitum' of the same, 'quater jam in ædibus nostris ab operariis et stipendiariis in me conspiratum et duce malorum omnium matre avaritiâ quos Deo adjuvante sic fregi ut valde omnes poeniteat suæ perfidiæ.']