ccessful state and an efficient ruler. If on the
other hand he had a liking for painting, he "expressed" his love for
beautiful lines and lovely colours in the pictures which have made the
names of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rafael and a thousand others household
words wherever people have learned to care for those things which
express a true and lasting beauty.

If this love for colour and line happened to be combined with an
interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da
Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and
flying machines, drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and
"expressed" his joy and interest in all things between Heaven and Earth
in prose, in painting, in sculpture and in curiously conceived engines.
When a man of gigantic strength, like Michael Angelo, found the brush
and the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture
and to architecture, and hacked the most terrific creatures out of heavy
blocks of marble and drew the plans for the church of St. Peter, the
most concrete "expression" of the glories of the triumphant church. And
so it went.

All Italy (and very soon all of Europe) was filled with men and women
who lived that they might add their mite to the sum total of our
accumulated treasures of knowledge and beauty and wisdom. In Germany,
in the city of Mainz, Johann zum Gansefleisch, commonly known as Johann
Gutenberg, had just invented a new method of copying books. He had
studied the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual
letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that they formed
words and whole pages. It is true, he soon lost all his money in a
law-suit which had to do with the original invention of the press. He
died in poverty, but the "expression" of his particular inventive genius
lived after him.

Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in Antwerp and
Froben in Basel were flooding the world with carefully edited editions
of the classics printed in the Gothic letters of the Gutenberg Bible,
or printed in the Italian type which we use in this book, or printed in
Greek letters, or in Hebrew.

Then the whole world became the eager audience of those who had
something to say. The day when learning had been a monopoly of a
privileged few came to an end. And the last excuse for ignorance was
removed from this world, when Elzevier of Haarlem began to print his
cheap and popular editions. T