In the year 1538 the will of that academician was opened. He therein directed his heirs to have his body washed by three famous physicians with as much aromatic vinegar as would cost forty ducats, and each physician was to receive as his fee three golden sequins absolutely fresh from the mint. The body was then to be wrapped in linen clothes soaked in essence of aloes, before being ‘comfortably’ laid to rest in a lead coffin and enclosed in one of cypress wood. The coffin was then to be placed in a marble monument to cost six hundred ducats. The inscription was to enumerate the actions and virtues of the deceased in eight Latin hexameters, of which the letters were to look tall to a spectator placed at a distance of twenty-five feet. The poet who composed the verses was to receive one sequin for each. Moreover, the history of the dead man’s family was to be written out in eight hundred verses, and seven psalms were to be composed after the manner of the Psalms of David, and twenty monks were to sing them before the tomb on the first Sunday of every month. We read without surprise that this will was not executed to the letter, and the tolerably reasonable monument erected to Pietro Bernardo by his descendants, [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE SACRISTY, FRARI] twenty years after his death, may still be seen in the church of the Frari. There were also academies which bore names, devices, and emblems of a nature that might well shock and surprise us, were they not the natural evidences of that coming decadence, moral and artistic, whereof all Italy, and Venice in particular, already bore the germs. Amongst the great names that belong to the end of the fifteenth century, as well as to the sixteenth, hardly any has more interesting associations for scholars than that of Aldus Manutius. The founder of the great family of scholars and printers was born at Sermoneta in the Pontifical States in 1449, and was over forty years old when he finally established himself in Venice. [Sidenote: _Firmin-Didot, Alde Manuce._] He had been tutor in the princely family of Pio, where he had educated the eldest son, and he himself added the name to his own, though he did not transmit it to his descendants. One of the legends about the origin of printing tells that it was invented in the Venetian city of Feltre, by a certain Castaldi, who was robbed of his invention by Germans, presumably Faust and Guttenberg. There is probably no foundation for this tale, but it is certain that the Venetians brought the art of printing to something near perfection within a few years of its creation, and that the government protected it by laws of singular wisdom and great severity, in an age when the idea of copyright was in its infancy.