by the civil authorities. The Church claimed not only the right to prohibit pernicious literature, but to authorise and to protect for sale throughout the world the works which secured its approval. The papal privileges conceded, in form at least, to the printers to whom they were issued, exclusive control not only within the States of the Church, but in all the States of the world that acknowledged the authority of the Church. There was, however, practically no machinery for enforcing the authority of the papal privileges. The material advantage belonging to such a privilege was that it carried with it the assurance of the approval of the Church concerning the character of the book. It constituted, namely, evidence that the book had secured the approval of the Church censors and (with an occasional exception) it preserved the book from interference on the part of local ecclesiastical censors, whose prejudices were usually more bitter and whose ignorant dread of heretical scholarship was greater than was the case with the censors appointed directly by the Congregation. The fact that, during the 16th and 17th centuries, Latin was the official language of scholarship and nearly universal as the language of literature, and that the great majority of publications of importance came into print in Latin, served to maintain a certain universality of learning, of literature, and of science and to build up a body of scholars who belonged not to any one State, least of all possible to the “country of origin,” but to Europe as a whole, to the world of literature and learning. The detail of smallest importance that occurs in thinking of the career of a Casaubon, Scaliger, or an Erasmus is the place of his birth. This universality of language furthered also, however, during the same centuries, the operations of the ecclesiastical censors and the enforcement of the policy of censorship. When there came to be a development of national literatures brought into print in the national languages, the difficulties of a standard of censorship and of a general enforcement of such standard, even through the States recognising the authority of the Church, became very much greater. It is evident, in fact, from the fragmentary additions of the lists of the later Indexes that the examiners, acting on behalf of the Congregation or of the Inquisition, had very little familiarity with literature that came into print in language other than Latin or Italian. The art of printing was one which evidently could not long be restricted to any one locality. It was speedily carried from Mayence to other communities in which literary interests or educational facilities could be furthered by its use.