but assuredly to compromise his life. Calvin, we must presume, had not at this time heard of Servetus's books; very certainly he had not read them; for one so acute and well-informed on theological matters as he, would not have been more than a few minutes face to face with their author without detecting him. But we find no hint in Calvin's writings that he then surmised who Villeneuve, his Parisian acquaintance, really was, and conclude that he lived for a dozen years or more without suspecting that the individual he discovered as Michael Serveto of the Book on Trinitarian Error ir his correspondent of Vienne, of the year 1546, was the same Villeneuve he had known in Paris in 1534.

Calvin then would have faced the danger of the public discussion, though persecution was hot at the time against heresy, and he was not unsuspected on this score. The danger to him, however, would have been slight in comparison with that which Servetus must have incurred. Calvin would not have stood forth on this occasion as the defender of any heresy, but of the very fundamentals of the Christian faith as embodied in its Creeds; to some of the most essential propositions in which Servetus, on the contrary, must have shown himself diametrically opposed. Servetus therefore, in this instance at least, saw perforce that discretion was the better part of valour, and wisely stayed away. He was in truth far too deeply compromised to venture on an appearance; for if discovered to be Michael Serveto, nothing could have saved him from

the heretic's death.

He had nothing for it therefore but to forfeit his engagement and lay himself open to Calvin's reproachful vous avez fuy la luite'-you fled the encounter-of a later and to him more momentous epoch in their common lives.

CHAPTER VIII.

LYONS. ENGAGEMENT AS READER FOR THE PRESS WITH THE TRECHSELS. EDITS THE GEOGRAPHY OF PTOLEMY.

THEOLOGY, however, after which we see Servetus still hankering-hæret lateri letalis arundo!-and even the study of the mathematics on which he was now engaged, had to be abandoned for present means of subsistence; and as Lyons seemed even a better field for the scholar than Paris, to Lyons, after a short stay at Avignon and Orleans, he betook himself. There he appears immediately to have found employment as reader and corrector of the press in the house of the distinguished typographers, the Brothers Trechsel; and if the Age have its character from the aggregate of its science and culture, and the Individual his bent from his more immediate surroundings, we cannot but think of Servetus's connection with these light-spreaders as another among the highly influential events in his life.

Books in the early days of printing were much more generally written in Latin than in the vernacular, and ever more and more with references to Greek,

lately brought greatly into vogue by Erasmus and the Reformers. The reader for press in the best estab lishments was therefore, and of necessity, a scholar and man of letters; and the opportunities for improvement now put in the way of one like Servetus, even whilst pursuing the mechanical part of his duties, have only to be hinted at to be appreciated. The reading room. of the distinguished typographers of those days was, indeed in some sort, a continuation of school and col- I lege to the competent corrector of the press.

Servetus's liberal elementary education, therefore, stood him in good stead at this time; for the Trechsels ere long, instead of holding him to the subordinate though still important duties of reader and corrector, engaged him further as editor of various costly works that issued from their press. Among the number of these a handsome edition of the Geography of Ptolemy 1 deserves particular mention, both as evincing the good repute in which he stood when we find him entrusted with such a work, and also as showing the extent of his reading and general knowledge-strangely enough, also, as influencing in some remote degree the fate that finally befel him.

Earlier editions of the Ptolemy were faulty in several ways, and disfigured in different degrees by

1 Claudii Ptolemæi Alexandrini Geographicæ Enarrationis Libri Octo; ex Bilibaldi Pirckhemeri Tralatione, sed ad Græca et prisca exemplaria a Michaele Villanovano jam primum recogniti. Adjecta insuper ab eodem Scholia,' etc. Lugduni, ex Officina Melch. et Gasp. Trechsel, 1535. Fol.

errors due, in part at least, to indifferent editing. These, where literal, Villanovanus corrected in the new issue; and where the sense was obscure through faulty wording, he brought light by the better readings he supplied, having formed his text, as he says, by collating all the editions he could lay his hands on, and where these gave him no aid, by suggestions of his own.

In his address to the reader, our editor, whom we shall often speak of under his adopted name of Villanovanus, gives a short account of his author, Claudius Ptolemæus, his birth-place, the Roman emperors under whom he flourished, 'his knowledge of philosophy and the mathematics, and the more than Herculean glory he achieved by his successful but peaceful invasion of so many lands. Nor indeed was this all, for he may be said to have bound earth to heaven by assimilating the measurements of the one to those of the other; and, coming after Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela, he as far surpassed them, as they excelled all the geographers who had gone before them.'

But Villanovanus did much more than edit and amend the text of Ptolemy. 'We,' he says, 'have added scholia to the text, whereby the book is made more interesting and more complete. Using our familiarity with the historical, poetical, and miscellaneous writings of the Greeks and Romans, in so far as they bear on our subject, we have given the names by which the countries, mountains, rivers, and cities were known to them; and, to aid the tyro, have further translated the