The type, an imitation of what made the reputation of the little volumes of the Gryphes of Lyons, is charming, the printing is perfect, and the paper, which is French--the development of paper-making in Holland and England did not take place till after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes--is excellent.

They are pretty volumes to the eye, but, as in all the reprints of the seventeenth century, the text is full of faults and most untrustworthy.
France, through a representative in a foreign land, however, comes into line again in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in a really serious fashion, thanks to the very considerable learning of a French refugee, Jacob Le Duchat, who died in 1748.

He had a most thorough knowledge of the French prose-writers of the sixteenth century, and he made them accessible by his editions of the Quinze Joies du Mariage, of Henri Estienne, of Agrippa d'Aubigne, of L'Etoile, and of the Satyre Menippee.
In 1711 he published an edition of Rabelais at Amsterdam, through Henry Bordesius, in five duodecimo volumes.

The reprint in quarto which he issued in 1741, seven years before his death, is, with its engravings by Bernard Picot, a fine library edition.

Le Duchat's is the first of the critical editions.