He was monster, it is true: to deny that is to belittle him; 
     but above all he was a man of his day, perhaps the most 
     free and complete expression of the age in which he 
     lived—the sixteenth century. That, and his enormous 
     ability, together with the fact that he founded the 
     modern press and used the hitherto unsuspected weapon 
     of publicity with an incomparable appreciation of its 
     power, are his chief claims upon our notice. (65)

     Born two years after Rabelais, he was, like Rabelais, just 
in time to seize the new instrument of the press. He became a 
one-man newspaper, a single-handed Northcliffe.

     He is, in a sense, in his “yellow” proclivities, the forerunner 
     of Mr. Hearst, Lord Northcliffe and others, while he is also 
     the father of the awful tribe of modern press agents,