quotes any but the French and English books. He shows no acquaintance with Welsh legends or traditions, unless it be with those in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote in Latin, nor of any local knowledge of Welsh places. Then as to the fanciful and inconsequent conjecture that he was a priest, he himself tells us that he was a knight, and thus implies that he was not a priest, while the words that 'he is the servant of Jesu by day and by night,' which suggested the notion that he was a priest, are evidently put into that form in order to give a rhythmical ending to the book. Nor did the priest's usual title of 'Sir' make him a knight. What we may say of Sir Thomas Malory is that he was probably of an old English family that he was a knight both in rank and in temper and spirit, and a lover alike of the gentle and the soldierly virtues of knighthood. He was a man of genius, and a devout Christian: he wrote for gentlewomen as well as gentlemen, believing that they would read his book from the beginning to the ending,' and that it would call forth in them a sympathy which would properly express itself in prayers for the pious writer.

WILLIAM CAXTON.

Of William Caxton we know more. A native of Kent, he became an apprentice, freeman, and livery man of the London Guild of Mercers, and was for many years resident in the English factory at Bruges, which was under their chief authority, though it represented and controlled all English trading interests in the Low Countries. Such factories were the usual, and indeed essential means of carrying on trade with foreign nations in the Middle Ages. Thus charters were granted by Henry IV and his successors to 'Merchant Adventurers' trading in Flanders, which, in giving them a corporate character, enabled them to treat with the authorities of the country more effectually than would have been possible to private individuals, and also to exercise needful control over, and give protection to, their own countrymen in the place. Though these Merchant Adventurers included many of the City Guilds, the majority were Mercers, and the factory at Bruges, while called 'the English Nation,' and its house 'the English House,' was practically under the management of the London Mercers' Guild. Mr. Blades has given an engraving from Flandria Illustrata of the 'Domus Anglorum' at Bruges as it was in Caxton's time; and he thus describes the mode of life of its inhabitants :

A great similarity prevailed in the internal management of all foreign guilds, arising from the fact that foreigners were regarded by the natives with jealousy and suspicion. The laws which governed the Esterlings in London, who lived in a strongly-built enclosure, called the Steel Yard, the site of which is now occupied by the City station of the South Eastern Railway Company, were much the same as those under which the English Nation lived in Bruges and other cities. The foreign merchant had, in Caxton's time, to brave a large amount of popular dislike, and to put up with great restraints on his liberty. Not only did he trade under harassing restrictions, but he resigned all hopes of domestic ties and family life. As in a monastery, each member had his own dormitory,

PRINTER AND PUBLISHER.

xxix

whilst at meal-times there was a common table. Marriage was out of the question, and concubinage was followed by expulsion. Every member was bound to sleep in the house, and to be in-doors by a fixed time in the evening, and for the sake of good order no woman of any description was allowed within the walls '.'

To this house of the English in Bruges Caxton went to live in the year 1441, being then probably about twenty years of age. In 1462 he was acting as 'Governor of the English Nation in the Low Countries,' and certainly in full possession of that office and title two or three years later. And in 1465 he was appointed by Edward IV one of two envoys with the title of Ambassadors, to negociate a renewal of the existing treaty of trade with the Duke of Burgundy. We do not know at what time he began to combine his literary studies or his acquaintance with the new art of printing with the prosecution of his official duties but he tells us that in 1471, at the request of Margaret, sister of Edward IV and wife of the Duke of Burgundy, he completed his translation of the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye which he had begun, but laid aside unfinished some time before. And then, in order to meet the desire of many friends to have copies of this translation, he printed such copies for their use.

He was now in the service of Margaret, and married; and about the year 1476, after thirty-five years' residence abroad, he returned to England, there to introduce the Printing Press, and to make himself famous to all ages by so doing. Caxton was not only a printer, but a translator, an editor, and the publisher of the books which he printed in unfailing succession, during the remaining fifteen years of his life. He was the first of that honourable order of publishers who from his day to our own still share with authors the gratitude of men for that inestimable boon, the Printed Book. There are still publishers among us who, like Caxton, are themselves authors and editors of no unimportant ability: and not only to them, but also to those who aspire only to be the publishers of other men's books, do we owe-what even the art of printing could have done little towards giving us—that broad spreading of knowledge which has become to us like the common light of day in which we live and move, only half conscious of its blessings. Mr. Blades justly defends Caxton against Gibbon's censure of him because he did not print the ancient classics. He did far better. He printed and published translations from those classics for men who could not read the originals; and it was surely no loss, but the greatest gain, to Englishmen that he enabled them to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the Polychronicon of English History (which latter he

In

The Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer,' by William Blades, 8vo, 1877, p. 22. this, and in his larger work, Life and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer,' 2 vols. 4to, 1861-1863, Mr. Blades has given a very learned and

complete history of Caxton and his times so far as they relate to him.

2

'like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself Till by broad spreading it do reach the bank.'

See First part of King Henry VI, i. 2, and the Variorum notes thereon.

carried down to his own time, rather than if he had printed Virgil and Livy original Latin. He laid the foundations of popular English literature in th possible way. He taught his countrymen to read, by giving them a larg judiciously selected succession, year by year, of books which they could and read. He gave them books of piety and devotion, poetry and history, of ch and romance, of morals and manners, including his own translations of Cicero Age and Friendship; of proverbs, fables, and classical legends; of statutes realm; and the Game of Chess, an allegory of civil government. We cannot down the list of ninety-nine books, including several second and third edi which Caxton printed, without wonder and respect for the genius and the judg of the man whose choice of subjects was so wide, so high-minded, moral, relig and generous, and at the same time so popular. He was indeed, in all sense: first of English publishers. He died in 1491, occupied (as his chief workman successor, Wynkyn de Worde, tells us) on the last day of his life in finishin translation of the Lives of the Fathers from the French. Mr. Blades conject with apparent probability, that his wife was the Mawde Caxton whose buri recorded in the parish books of St. Margaret's in 1489, and he adds:

‘If so, it will explain, in a most interesting manner, the reason why he in year suspended printing the Fayts of Arms until he had finished a new un taking, The Arte and Crafte to Die Well.

The operation of the silent but never-failing laws which govern the growth progress of our national life, seems to be sustained and directed in certain ep of our history by great men who have yet themselves been made what they ar those very laws. Among such laws are the ideals of chivalry in its twofold as of self-sacrifice and of self-assertion. And not least among the men who given to the spirit of chivalry its special English forms in which the sense of and zeal in the redress of wrongs are characteristic, stand Sir Thomas Malory William Caxton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK.

xxxi

2. THE TEXT, AND ITS SEVERAL EDITIONS.

THE first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among the finest specimens of Caxton's printing. One belongs to Mrs, Abby E. Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at the sale of the Osterley library in 18851; and the other to Earl Spencer. The Osterley copy, which is perfect, has the autograph 'Oxford' on the first leaf; it was sold with the Harleian Library to Osborne the bookseller, and apparently bought of him for £5 5s. by Bryan Fairfax, who sold his library to Mr. Child, maternal ancestor of the Earl of Jersey 2. The Althorp copy, which was bought at Mr. Lloyd's sale in 1816 for £320, had eleven leaves deficient; but these were supplied by Mr. Whittaker in fac-simile from the Osterley copy with remarkable skill, though on collation with the original I have found many mistakes. This edition, like all Caxton's books but one, has no title-page; the Prohem or Preface begins at the top of the first page *.

The two next editions of Morte Arthur were printed by Wynkyn de Worde, the chief workman and successor of Caxton, in 1498 and 1529. Only one copy of each is known. That of 1498 is in the Althorp Library: it wants some pages, but contains the Preface, which is a reprint of that of Caxton, though it here follows instead of preceding the Table of Contents.

1

Englishmen, who feel shame and sorrow for the loss of the only perfect first copy of our National Epic, may yet be glad to know it has an honoured place with our worthier kinsfolk across the Atlantic, in the rich library and museum of Mr. and Mrs. Abby Pope:

'And, so sepulchred, in such pomp doth lie, That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die.'

2 Dibdin's Typographical Antiquities, 1810, vol. i, pp. 242, 254.

3 Dibdin's Supplement to the Bibliotheca Spenceriana, vol. ii. p. 213; or Ædes Althorpianæ, vol. vi. p. 213. I would here express my thanks to Earl Spencer for sending to the British Museum for my use his

This edition, which has numerous

Caxton, and his unique copy of Wynkyn de Worde's first edition of Morte Darthur, as also for favouring me with details of information respecting the former; and to the Earl of Jersey for permitting me to examine his Caxton at Osterley.

4 Caxton followed the usage of the scribes in this particular; for, with one exception only, and at the very end of his career, where the title of the book is printed alone in the centre of the first page, his books appear without any title page whatever. Wynkyn de Worde adopted the use of title-pages immediately after the death of his master.' Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England's first printer, p. 45. By William Blades, 1877.

woodcuts, is not an exact reprint of Caxton's; there are differences of spelling and occasionally of a word; and the passage in the last chapter but one, beginning 'Oh ye mighty and pompous lords,' and ending with 'turn again to my matter,' which is not in Caxton's edition, appears here, as in all later editions1. The edition of 1529 is in the British Museum, and wants the Title, Preface, and part of the Table of Contents.

In 1557 the book was reprinted by William Copland, with the title of 'The story of the most noble and worthy kynge Arthur, the whiche was one of the worthyes chrysten, and also of his noble and valiaūte knyghtes of the rounde Table. Newly imprynted and corrected mccccclvij. ¶ Imprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland.' And on the title-page, above the last line, is a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon, of which that on the title-page of Southey's edition is a bad copy. A copy of this edition is in the British Museum, with a note that this is the only one with a title which the annotator has seen.

A folio and a quarto edition were published by Thomas East, without date, but probably about 1585, the former of which is in the British Museum.

The next, and last black-letter, edition is that of William Stansby, in 1634, which has been reprinted by Mr. Wright, and which contains the woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur in the middle and his knights around, a copy of which is familiar to many of us in one of the small editions of 1816. From the fact of an omission in this edition which exactly corresponds with a complete leaf in East's folio, Mr. Wright concludes that the one was printed from the other. Each succeeding edition departs more than the previous one from the original of Caxton; but if we compare this of 1634 with Caxton's, we find the variations almost infinite. Besides remodelling the preface, dividing the book into three parts, and modernising the spelling and many of the words, there are a number of more or less considerable variations and additions, of which Mr. Wright has given some of the more important in his notes, but which I estimate at above twenty thousand in the whole; and which have probably arisen in the minor instances from the printer reading a sentence and then printing it from recollection, without farther reference to his 'copy,' but in the others from a desire to improve the original simplicity by what the editor calls 'a more eloquent and ornated style and

phrase.'

No new edition seems to have been published till 1816, when two independent editions appeared, one in two, and the other in three 24mo volumes.

Both are

modernised for popular use, and are probably the volumes through which most of my own generation made their first acquaintance with King Arthur and his

knights; but neither has any merit as to its editing.

In 1817 Messrs. Longmans and Co. published an edition in two volumes quarto,

1 As the passage is worth preserving I have given it at the end of the volume,

Note A, p. 488.