"Would it have damped his zeal, we wonder, could he have foreseen that his unexampled work should drop into oblivion, after historians, such as the best informed of Doges, Marco Foscarini, knowing next to nothing of him--till suddenly a lucky and delighted student fell upon those volumes in the Austrian Library; and all at once, after three centuries and more, old Venice sprang to light under the hand of her old chronicler, and Marino Sanudo with all his pictures, his knick-knacks, his brown rolls of manuscript and dusty volumes round him, regained, as was his right, the first place among Venetian historians,--one of the most notable figures of the mediæval world." To be held in everlasting remembrance was the reward that Marino Sanudo ardently coveted; and though never appreciated by his contemporaries, and utterly forgotten by the whole world for hundreds of years, he is now respected and valued, and that _eterna memoria_, to earn which he valued no toil, at last is his. It remains to speak of Theobaldo Mannucci, or Manutio, familiarly called Messer or Ser Aldo, best known to us as Aldus, the great printer of Venice, whose house may still be seen, in the Campo San Agostino, near the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista, near by the spot on which stood the house of the _gran cavaliere_, Bajamonte Tiepolo. Aldus was not a Venetian, having first seen the light in Bassiano, near Rome. The history of {327} his earlier years is indistinct; but this much seems to be true, that, being a great scholar and student, he had also been a tutor in the family of the Pii, princes of Carpi. He was also the friend of Count Giovanni Pico at Mirandola, one of the most scholarly men of his age. At length, for one reason and another, too many and too involved to be given here, he decided to go to Venice, and begin that making of books which in his hands became such an honor and advantage to that city; and in this he was much encouraged, and probably substantially aided, by Count Pico. Thus a Florentine and a Roman brought to this Mistress of the Sea a kind of prestige which no son of hers had given. Aldus probably knew that foreign printers, of whom we have spoken, had been encouraged to do their work at Venice; but he was no mere printer, and although it is by that name that he is most frequently spoken of, he was a scholar before he was a printer, and became a printer because of his scholarship. He had found how meagre and incorrect were the text-books of his time; and to supply these defects and give to the world books free from blemishes in substance and form, was his untradesmanlike motive.