would soon perish.  He must not be amazed by the present abundance that he sees, but should look forward to the needs of the future.  Though we had thousands of volumes, we must not cease writing; for printed books are never so good.  Indeed they usually pay little heed to ornament and orthography.’  It is noticeable that only in this last point does Trithemius claim for manuscripts superior accuracy.  In the matter of permanence we may wonder what he would have thought of modern paper.

The first advance, then, rendered possible by the invention of printing was to more uniform and better texts:  the next step forward was no less important.  To scholars content with the general sense of a work, a translation might be as acceptable as the original.  Improved standards of accuracy led men to perceive that an author must be studied in his own tongue:  in order that no shade of meaning might be lost.  Here again the two periods are easily distinguished.  Nicholas V set his scholars, Poggio and Valla, to translate the Greeks, Herodotus and Thucydides, Aristotle and Diodorus.  The feature of the later epoch is the number of Greek editions which came out to supplant the versions in common use.  The credit for this advance in critical scholarship must be given to Aldus for his Greek Aristotle, which appeared in 1495-9; and he subsequently led the way with numerous texts of the Greek classics.  At the same time he proposed to apply the same principle to Biblical study.  As early as 1499 Grocin in a letter alludes to Aldus’ scheme of printing the whole Bible in the original ‘three languages’, Hebrew, Greek and Latin; and a specimen was actually put forth in 1501.

In this matter precedence might seem to lie with the Jewish printers, who produced the Psalms in Hebrew in 1477, and the Old Testament complete in 1488; but as the Jews never at any period ceased to read their Scriptures in Hebrew, there was no question of recovery of an original.  Aldus did not live to carry his scheme out; and it was left to Ximenes and the band of scholars that he gathered at Alcala, to produce the first edition of the Bible complete in the original tongues, the Complutensian Polyglott, containing the Hebrew side by side with the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and for the Pentateuch a Syriac paraphrase.  The New Testament in this great enterprise was finished in 1514, and the whole work was ready by 1517, shortly before Ximenes’ death.  But as publication was delayed till 1522, the actual priority rests with Erasmus, whose New Testament in Greek with a Latin translation by himself appeared, as we have seen, in 1516.