decease, to his son-in-law, Jean Moertorf, who had married his
daughter, Martine, in 1570, and had Latinized his surname to
Moretus in accordance with the curious custom that prevailed among
scholars of the sixteenth century. Thus Servetus was really Miguel
Servete, and Thomas Erastus was Thomas Lieber. The foundation of
the fortunes of the house was undoubtedly its monopoly--analogous
to that enjoyed by the English house of Spottiswoode, and by the
two elder Universities--of printing the liturgical works--Missals,
Antiphons, Psalters, Breviaries, etc.--that were used throughout
the Spanish dominions. No attempt, however, seems to have been
made in the later stages of the history of the house to adopt
improved machinery, or to reconstruct the original, antiquated
buildings. The establishment, accordingly, when it was taken over
by the city in 1876, retained virtually the same aspect as it had
worn in the seventeenth century, and remains to the present day
perhaps the best example in the world of an old-fashioned city
business house of the honest time when merchant-princes were
content to live above their office, instead of seeking solace in
smug suburban villas. The place has been preserved exactly as it
stood, and even the present attendants are correctly clad in the
sober brown garb of the servants of three hundred years since. It
is interesting, not only in itself, but as an excellent example of
how business and high culture were successfully combined under the
happier economic conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The Plantin-Moretus family held a high position in the
civic life of Antwerp, and mixed in the intellectual and artistic
society for which Antwerp was famed in the seventeenth century--
the Antwerp of Rubens (though not a native) and Van Dyck, of
Jordaens, of the two Teniers, of Grayer, Zegers, and Snyders.
Printing, indeed, in those days was itself a fine art, and the