causes combined to keep the new ideas, which were working such wonderful changes in Italy and elsewhere, out of England. Uninspired by these ideas, untouched by the fresh enthusiasm that stirred the men beyond the Alps, poets like Occleve and Lydgate worked on, copying the same old models, imitating a manner which had lost its freshness and novelty, and, perhaps, retelling stories which had come down from medieval times. We saw further, that while these literary or scholastic poets, who took their ideas from books, were apt to grow prosy, long-winded, and conventional, the people, who lived apart from books, and who loved songs and plays and stories, had a true and living literature of their own. This love of literature among the people themselves is the important fact for us to remember. The people were narrow-minded, superstitious, ignorant of many things, but they were apt to learn. If they could not read poetry, many among them could repeat or hear it with delight. If a great poet should rise up among them, there were many ready to give him welcome. Even during the middle years of the fifteenth century, a few scholars grew dissatisfied with the narrow limits of the old scholastic learning. So it happened that the new learning did not merely flow into England as an overflow of water reaches and covers a neighboring tract of level ground, but Englishmen themselves, moved by a strong desire, traveled to Italy in search of the new learning and brought it home.

William Caxton. About the middle of Edward IV's reign, while the nation was yet unsettled, and before the new ideas had made much progress in England, WILLIAM CAXTON, the first English printer, set up his press in London. Caxton was born about 1422, in what is known as the Weald of Kent, a region then wild and

partially wooded, in the southwestern part of that county. He belonged, like Chaucer, to the respectable and prosperous merchant-class. Education was not as general then as it is now, but Caxton was sent to school as a boy. In after life he spoke gratefully of his parents for having given him this opportunity, and adds that for this cause he remembers them in his prayers. When he was about sixteen he was apprenticed to a rich and influential merchant in London, and soon after his master's death in 1449 he settled in the city of Bruges, If it plete ond man spirituel o temporel to bÿe onė pyes of two and thre comemoraciōs of (alicburi vse enpryntid after the forne of this pœsët lettre whiche ken Wel and tuulý correct late hými come to weltmó; nester in to the almonelrye at the reed male andhe chal haue them good there.

Suplico Get œdula

Reproduction of a Caxton Advertisement

in Flanders, which was then a great center of trade. Here Caxton prospered, for he was a capable and industrious man of business, and he appears to have been generally liked and trusted. But besides being a good man of business, Caxton loved books, especially the old romances, and he was able to write easily and in an entertaining way. So in his spare time he began to translate a collection of stories about Troy from French into English. About this time the Duke of Burgundy, within whose dominions Bruges lay, married Margaret, the sister of Edward IV, the English King. Caxton entered the service of the Duchess Margaret, and was encouraged by her to resume and complete his transla

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tions, which for a time he had laid aside. As there were then many English in Bruges, the book was much sought for, and Caxton found it hard to supply the demand. So he determined to print his book, instead of employing the old and laborious practice of having copies made of it by hand. "For as much," he says in his preface, as in the writing of the same my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, my eyes dimmed with over-much looking on the white paper . . . and also because I have promised to divers gentlemen to address them as hastily as I might in this said book, therefore I have practised and learned, at my great charge and expense, to ordain this said book in print . . . and it is not written with pen and ink, as other books been, to the end that every man may have them at once." The Historie of Troye appeared in 1474. It was the first book to be printed in English. Two years later Caxton returned to England, and established himself as a printer near Westminster Abbey. Although he was by this time over fifty, Caxton worked there both as printer and translator for fifteen years with an enthusiastic industry. In 1477 he printed The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, translated from the French by his friend and patron Lord Rivers, the brother-inlaw of the King, and edited by Caxton himself. This was the first book printed in England. During the next fourteen years he printed about eighty books, besides getting out new editions of some old ones. Some of them Caxton translated himself, and for many of them he wrote prefaces, from which we can often learn something of the old printer's tastes and difficulties, and of his keen interest in his work. He seems to have been a simple-minded but practical man, a shrewd tradesman, with a vein of romance in him and an unobtrusive

sense of humor. He enjoyed the favor of the great. "Many noble and divers gentlemen" discussed literary matters with him in his humble workshop; even Kings took an interest in his work. He published the poems of Chaucer, whom he calls "that noble and great philosopher," "who deserves the name of a laureate poet," of Gower, and of other famous men. In the great world outside the walls of his peaceful workshop, terrible and momentous things were being done. The Duke of Gloucester murdered his little nephew and seated himself on the throne as Richard III: the battle of Bosworth was fought and the bloody Wars of the Roses were at last ended. But through all these years of battle, and violence, and sudden change, Caxton, in his little shop under the shadow of the Abbey, carried on in faithfulness and quietness his great work for England. Like Bede he labored until the last, finishing one of his books, The Lives of the Fathers, on the very day he died, in the year before Columbus discovered America.

Malory's Morte d'Arthur. - One of the most important of all the books that Caxton printed, was a collection of stories about King Arthur and his knights, under the name of Morte d'Arthur, or the Death of Arthur. The book was compiled by a certain Sir Thomas Malory. It was based on several French romances, which Malory translated into English prose, and connected as well as he could in such a way as to make a fairly continuous story. Who Malory was is uncertain, but we are told that he finished his book in the middle years of Edward IV's reign (1471), and we know that Caxton printed it in 1485. Malory's task was a difficult one, for there were many separate stories about Arthur and his different knights, and even the same story had been told in many different ways. It was consequently very hard to

arrange all this mass of legend in an orderly way so that it would be really one book and not a mere succession of separate adventures. It would probably have taken a man of the highest genius to unite all these fragmentary and conflicting stories and to make one complete story as perfect in its design and proportions as a great epic. Malory had not the genius to do this, but he succeeded better than any one had done before him. He had not the finished art of a modern storywriter, and the reader of to-day often finds his noble old book confusing and tedious. But we must remember that when Malory wrote, the language was still unsettled, and that very few books of any importance had then been written in English prose. Whatever its shortcomings, the Morte d'Arthur was the greatest English book of romance: written when the old feudal nobility of England were being destroyed in the strife of the Civil Wars, it expressed the spirit of the dying medieval chivalry in its weakness and its strength; at the very end of the Middle Ages it gathered together these fragments of old romances, gave them a new life and handed them on to later times. For generations it was mainly from Malory that England learned the stories of her great national hero of romance, and it is to Malory's book that poets like Tennyson have turned when they sought to retell these old legends in modern verse. In this wonderful storehouse of romance you will find many stories that modern writers have made familiar. You may read there of the doings of King Arthur himself— how he got his wonderful sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, how he warred against the heathen, how he married the beautiful Guinevere, and how at last, wounded in battle, he did not die but was taken to the peaceful Vale of Avalon to heal him of his wound. You