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One of the rooms was the nursery of the Plantin children. The men who show you over the house are dressed as servants were in Plantin's time. By going there you will get a far better idea of the family life of those times than by reading any number of story-books or looking at any number of pictures.

At once all Dennistoun's cherished dreams of finding priceless manuscripts in untrodden corners of France flashed up, to die down again the next moment. It was probably a stupid missal of Plantin's printing, about 1580. Where was the likelihood that a place so near Toulouse would not have been ransacked long ago by collectors?

Proof-reading was then an erudite profession, and Francois Ravelingen, who entered Plantin's office as proof-reader in 1564, and assisted Arias Montanus in revising the sheets of the Polyglot Bible, is said to have been a great Greek and Oriental scholar, and crowned a career of honourable toil, like Hogarth's Industrious Apprentice, by marrying his master's eldest daughter, Marguerite, in 1565.

Everything here, in short, is interesting: the press-room, which was used almost continuously and practically without change two of the antiquated presses of Plantin's own time remain for nearly three centuries; the Great and Little Libraries, with their splendid collection of books; the archive room, with its long series of business accounts and ledgers; the private livingrooms of the Moretus family; and last, but not least, the modest little shop, where books still repose upon the shelves, which looks as though the salesman might return at any moment to his place behind the counter.

At once all Dennistoun's cherished dreams of finding priceless manuscripts in untrodden corners of France flashed up, to die down again the next moment. It was probably a stupid missal of Plantin's printing, about 1580. Where was the likelihood that a place so near Toulouse would not have been ransacked long ago by collectors?

From Plantin's shop in Antwerp came in 1587 a narrative by another Hofmeister Stephen Vinandus Pighius concerning the life and travels of his princely charge, Charles Frederick, Duke of Cleves, who on his grand tour died in Rome. Pighius discusses at considerable length, in describing the hesitancy of the Duke's guardians about sending him on a tour, the advantages and disadvantages of travel.