Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/64

50 was another of his friends and patrons, translating the "Diets and Sayings of the Philosophers" for his nephew, the Prince of Wales, and introducing Caxton, when it wasprinted, to present it to the king and royal family.



We should, however, afford no idea of the amount of service rendered by Caxton in his own lifetime if we did not give a catalogue of the works he printed. They are:—The Recule of the Histories of Troye; the Game of Chess; the Pilgrimage of the Soul; Liber Festivalis, or Directions for keeping Feasts all the Year; Quatuor Sermones, or Four Sermons, in English; the Golden Legend, three editions; the Art and Craft to know well to Die, from the French; Infanta Salvatoris, the Childhood of our Saviour; the Life of St. Catherine of Siena; Speculum Vitæ Christi, or Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; Directorium Sacerdotum, a Directory of Church Services; a Book of Divers Ghostly Matters; the Life of St. Winifred; the Provincial Constitutions of Bishop Lyndwood of St. Asaph, in Latin; the Profitable Book of Man's Love, called the Chastening of God's Children; the Book of the Life of Jason; Godfrey of Bologn; the Knight of the Tower, from the French; the Book of the Order of Chivalry or Knighthood, from the French; the Book Royal, or the Book for a King; a Book of the Noble Histories of King Arthur and certain of his knights; the History of the Noble, Right Valiant, and Right Worthy Knight, Paris, and of the fair Vienne; the Book of Feats of Arms and of Chivalry, from the French of Christine of Pisa; the History of King Blanchardine and Queen Eglantine, his Wife; Renard the Fox, from the German, translated also by Caxton; the Subtle Histories and Fables of Æsop; the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, &c.



That is a noble monument of labour in the very outset of printing in this country, and at the latter end only of a busy life. But while Caxton was thus busy he saw others around him also as hard at work with their presses: Theodor Rood, John Lettow, William Machelina, and Wynkyn de Worde, foreigners, and Thomas Hunt, an Englishman. A schoolmaster of St. Albans set up a press there, and several books were printed at Oxford in 1478, and to the end of the century. There is no direct evidence of any work being printed in Scotland during this century, though such may have been the case, and all traces of the fact obliterated in the almost universal destruction of the cathedral and conventual libraries at the Reformation. James III. was known to collect the most superb specimens of typography, and Dr. Henry mentions seeing a magnificent edition of "Speculum Moralitatis" which had been in that king's possession and contained his autograph.

Not less meritorious benefactors of their country, next to the writers and printers of books, are those who collected them into libraries, and the most munificent patron and encourager of learning in this manner was the unfortunate Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. He gave to the University of Oxford a library of 600 volumes in 1440, valued at £1,000. Some of these very volumes yet remain in different collections. Duke Humphrey not only bought books, but he employed men of science and learning to translate and transcribe. He kept celebrated writers from France and Italy, as well as Englishmen, to translate from the Greek and other languages; and is said to have written himself on astronomy, a scheme of astronomical calculations under his name still remaining in the library of Gresham College. The great Duke of Bedford, likewise, when master of Paris, purchased and sent to this country the royal library, containing 853 volumes, valued at 2,223 livres.