Be, William Le

, engraver, and letter-founder, was born at Troyes, in 1525, son of Guilleaume le Be, a noble bourgeois, and Magdalen de St. Aubin. Being brought up in the house of Robert Stephens, whom his father supplied with paper, he got an insight into the composition of the types of that famous printing-house. He afterwards, by order of Francis I. made those beautiful oriental types which Robert Stephens used; and Philip II. employed him to prepare those with which his Bible of Antwerp was printed. In 1545 le B6 took a journey to Venice, and there cut for Mark Anthony Justiniani, who had raised a Hebrew printing-house, the punches necessary to the casting of the founts to be employed in that | establishment. Being returned to Paris, he there practised his art till 1598, the year of his decease. Casaubon speaks of him highly to his credit in his preface to the Opuscula of Scaliger. Henry le Be, his son, was a printer at Paris, where he gave in 1581, a quarto edition of the “Institutiones Clenardi Gr.” This book, which was of great utility to the authors of the “Methode Grecque” of Port-royal, is a master-piece in printing. His sons and his grandsons signalised themselves in the same art. The last of them died in 1685. ¹