CHAPTER VIII.

FROM CHAUCER TO CAXTON.

William Caxton (1422-1491) died the year before Columbus discovered America. He introduced the printingpress into England and set up his establishment in Westminster. The first book known to have been printed by him in England is The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published in 1477. He went in 1441 to Bruges, prospered in business there, learned the new art of printing with movable metal types, and while in that city produced, in 1474, the oldest English book recorded. It was a translation from the French, and is entitled the Recuyell of the Historye of Troy. In Bruges, also, he probably published the Game and Playe of the Chesse.

The simple expedient of substituting cast letter types for the old engraved blocks wrought a prodigious revolution in the intellectual world. This invention, by some attributed to Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem, is dated about 1445.* The credit of the invention is also given to John Gutenberg of Mainz and his patron Fust, or Faust. Caxton came to London in 1476, and from that time until his death labored assiduously at his vocation, giving to the world ninety-nine books, of which thirty-eight survive. The greater part of his publications were in English, and were translations and original works. Many of the translations are from the printer's own pen. To other books he added prefaces of his own composition, so that he is fairly entitled to a place among English authors.

*See Encycl. Britannica, Vol. XXIII., Art. Typography.

Among his more famous editions are the works of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Malory's King Arthur, the Golden Legend, and English versions of some Latin classics, of Reynard the Fox, and Esop's Fables.*

With Caxton and printing end the archaic and fluctuating forms of literary English. Several causes depressed literary activity in the England of the fifteenth century. The serfs had rapidly changed their condition to that of free laborers, and their discontents disturbed the land. Tendencies toward religious reformation were met by persecution. Henry V. renewed with great energy and success the wars with France, and crushed the people with taxes. The court began to make foreign alliance and to bring Continental manners into fashion. Under Henry VI. the Hundred Years' War came to a close, with the final and ignominious expulsion of the English from France; and soon after (1455) the War of the Roses broke out, in which the houses of York and Lancaster contended for the crown. With their liberties repressed, with Parliament subservient, with their energies expended in fruitless foreign or civil war, there was little to stir the patriotism or the spirit of the nation.

On the other hand, powerful energies were awakening. In the middle of this century Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks, and the scholars of the East took refuge among Western nations, carrying with them their Greek learning. This was welcomed with avidity, giving rise to the "new learning," or the "humanities," as these studies were called. New foundations were established for universities and schools. Culture, once the peculiar possession of the Church, was diffusing itself among the laity. There is scarcely an ecclesiastical writer of note in the century.

One of the earliest of jurists, Sir John Fortescue, a Somerset knight and chief justice of the King's Bench, adhered to the fortunes of the

* See Biography and Typography of Caxton, by W. Blades (1882).

Lancastrian Henry VI., wrote on constitutional law,* shared his master's exile, and prepared a Latin treatise for Henry's unfortunate son, Edward, In Praise of the Laws of England. Of Sir Thomas Malory we know but little. He gathered from a score of French sources the legends of King Arthur, rendered them into a "pleasant jumble" of prose, and was fortunate in having them printed by Caxton in 1485.† In his work Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Tennyson have found themes. Many passages in The Idyls of the King are simply Malory's statements turned into Tennyson's exquisite verse.

The Paston Letters, the earliest collection of the kind in the English language, form a regular series, extending from 1422 to 1509, and are so numerous that they filled five volumes on their first pub-. lication. The letters are of historical importance, not only from the light they throw upon some of the dark passages of English history, but also from their invaluable illustrations of domestic manners in the fifteenth century. The inner life of a knightly family of Norfolk is laid open before us; its character and spirit are revealed to us through the very thoughts and words of men then living.‡

In this century, there was a burst of song in the north, where the speech closely resembled the vernacular of the English people. In this period Scotland was the theater of battles, murders, and executions, incident to the constant conflict of the Stuart kings with their turbulent nobles. The singers of the times strove to arouse the spirit of nationality by celebrating the exploits of Bruce and Wallace and episodes of the border wars, which in the preceding age had secured the independence of Scotland.

The most brilliant poet of the century is James I. of Scotland (1394-1437). In 1406, he was captured on his way from Scotland to France, and was taken to the English court. Henry IV. and his successors detained him as a prisoner for eighteen years, but permitted him instruction in martial exer

* Reprinted by Clarendon Press (1886).

† See an edition of Caxton's version of Malory's Noble Histories of King Arthur and Certain of his Knights, turned into modern spelling by John Rhys (2 vols., 1893-1894).

James Gairdner reproduced these letters for Arber's Annotated Reprints (3 vols., 1872-1875)

cises, wherein he became expert. The loneliness of his earlier years he consoled by pursuit of music, poetry, and other arts, until adversity developed those sterling qualities of character which made him the most eminent king of the Stuart line. In the last year of his imprisonment he wrote his best work, the King's Quair (a quire, or book), a poetical record of incidents in his life. The poem contains nearly fourteen hundred lines, describing his hopes and despairs, and is superior to any other poem produced in the long interval between Chaucer and Spenser. It is distinguished by tenderness of expression, and by a manly delicacy of feeling. This poet's adoption of the Chaucerian stanza has given to that stanza the name of rhyme royal.*

Of other Scotch poets, there are the minstrel Blind Harry,† who in heroic rhyming couplets of nearly twelve thousand lines told the story of the hero Wallace; Robert Henryson,‡ a disciple of Chaucer, and the earliest and best of lyric singers, who to the Testament of Cresseid and a pastoral of love, Robene Makyne, added ballads, moral fables, and minor song; the "poet-bishop" Gawin Douglas § (about 1474-1522), who made the first English rendering of the Æneid; and, more excellent than these, William Dunbar, in humor most Chaucerian, who, in the allegorical poem of the Thrissell and the Rois celebrated the union of Scotland and England by the marriage of James IV. with Margaret Tudor. Dunbar writes with tender pathos in the Lament for the Makaris, and with boisterous satire in the Dance of the Seven Deidly Synnes.

English Ballads. - Andrew Lang believes that the origin of ballads was in the dance, to which their measure and refrain correspond, and that it is as hopeless to trace them to their first form as to fix the beginning of the folk-song of any people. "Ballads," he says, "sprang from the very heart of the

*The King's Tragedy by D. G. Rossetti is a poetic version of the assassination of King James.

† See A Critical Study of Blind Harry by James Moir (1884-1889).

An edition of the Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson was edited and published by David Laing (1865).

§ His complete works were published by John Small (4 vols., 1874).

people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the class that continues nearest to the state of natural men. They make music with the splash of the fisherman's oars and the hum of the spinning-wheel, and keep time with the step of the plowman as he drives his team. The country seems to have aided in their making; the bird's note rings in them, the tree has lent her whispers, the stream its murmur, the village bell its tinkling tune. Ballads are a voice from secret places, from silent peoples, and old times long dead; and as such they stir us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can never attain." If we may judge from their contents, many early ballads now recovered must have been familiar to the ears of the fifteenth century, though we scarcely have them in their earliest form.

Anarchy in the State, tyranny, and the constant warfare waged along the Scottish Border were among the causes which stirred the rude poets to a recital of their loves and hatreds. Oral tradition saved their compositions for us. They were not gathered into a volume until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Bishop Percy brought them together. As we read his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the old minstrels place us under a spell. We sup, and watch, and fight, and love with the brave, lawless yeomen. Strive as they may, our poets of a nobler civilization do not make companion-pieces to the Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chase, or to Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, William of Cloudesley. Personal prowess and reckless daring were the reliance of men who lived amid the perils of the Scottish Border. They inspired the old ballads. Many ballads appear in two forms: the early genuine verses in their original rudeness, and a later edition, in which some versifier has endeavored to smooth and polish their crudities. These attempts at improvement dissipate the energy and bleach the color of the original.