followers. He was at Bruges five months, and then returned to become king again. Among the companions of Edward in this brief exile to the city in which Caxton served the king's sister, was his brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, Lord Kivers, translator, from the French, of a book of Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. He submitted his translation to Caxton's criticism. Having achieved his own version of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye-a work afterwards occupying 778 folio pages of print-Caxton became tired of making copies by hand, and made use of the types of Colard Mansion, a copyist and illuminator who had brought printing into Bruges.

It is assumed to be Perhaps it was; but

Caxton himself was printer of his translation, also from the French, of a moral treatise, The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Of this there are two editions, the first said to have been finished on the last day of March, 1474. the first book printed in this country. there is no evidence that Caxton did not print it abroad. It is to the printed copy of the translation of "Les Dictes Moraux des Philosophes," as The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers, by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, that Caxton first added, "imprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westmynstre ;" and the date of it is 1477. A book of 1480 specifies the Abbey as the place where Caxton had his press. Resort to the Abbey scriptorium for copies of books had led to a settlement of copyists within the Abbey precincts. Among the "Paston Letters" is a book bill, dated 1468, from a copyist named W. Ebesham, who said that he was living at some expense in the Sanctuary, Westminster. Caxton's place of business was at a house called the Red Pale, in the Almonry, within the Abbey precincts, and he died there in 1491. Wynken de Worde, his immediate successor, dated some books from "Caxton's house at Westminster." It was in 1485 that Caxton printed the first edition of the Morte Darthur from a connected prose recital of the story of the chief Arthurian romances by Sir Thomas Malory, who says that he finished his work in the ninth year of Edward IV. (1470).

28. In those days Lorenzo de' Medici ruled Florence. Michael Angelo and Ariosto were both born in one year; and the year, 1474, was that in which Caxton completed the printing of his "Game and Play of Chess." Italian fine gentlemen had begun to affect far-fetched conceits and ingenuities of speech. Lorenzo himself, who set forth Platonism in his Altercazione,

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was writing love sonnets and canzone in a style that would tell how the rays of love from the eyes of his lady penetrated through his eyes the shadow of his heart, like a ray of sun entering the dark beehive by its fissure; and how then, as the hive wakes, the bees fly, full of new cares, hither and thither in the forest, sip at flowers, fly out, return laden with odorous spoil, sting those who are seen idle, so the spirits stir in his heart, fly out to seek the light, &c. &c. But in these days Florence had other poets. Then it was that Luigi Pulci, born in 1432, cleverest of three verse-writing brothers, wrote in the fashionable strain of the flowing of the river Lora in the Apennines into the Severus, in his poem of "The Dryad of Love." The nymph Lora was loved by the satyr Severus. Diana changed him to a stag, then hunted him, and changed him into a river; but the loving nymph, changed also into a stream, ran to her union with him. Luigi Pulci wrote also in a far different vein. Spanish romance was influenced by Vasco de Lobeira, a Portuguese of Chaucer's time, who had been knighted on the battle-field by the King John to whom John of Gaunt married his daughter Philippa. Lobeira, who may have met Chaucer on the occasion of that marriage (ch. iv. § 39), died in 1403, and had written towards the close of the fourteenth century his "Amadis of Gaul," a long prose romance of original invention, which, about 1503, was turned into Spanish, and established in Spain a new form of knightly prose romance. "Amadis" itself had and deserved more popularity than most of its successors. But an earlier impulse from Spain quickened development in Italy of chivalrous romance, and caused Luigi Pulci to produce, in octave rhyme, a prelude of Italian Charlemagne poetry in the irreligious and half-mocking "Morgante Maggiore," of which the first canto has been translated into English by Lord Byron. Then it was also that in Florence the pastoral strain, of which Boccaccio, in his "Admetus," sounded the first note, was taken up by Agnolo of Monte Pulciano. Agnolo, called PolitianusPoliziano--was a marvellous young man of twenty when Caxton finished the printing of his "Game and Play of Chess." He was born in 1454, and had been educated at the expense of Cosmo de' Medici. He studied Greek under Andronicus of Thessalonica, Plato under Marsilius Ficinus, Aristotle under Argyropoulos; he became professor of Latin and Greek at Florence, and was sought as a teacher even by the pupils of Chalcondylas, for he was poet as well as scholar, and could put true life into his

teaching. He was but forty when he died, and among his poems he has left us the pastoral tale of Orpheus, his "Orfeo," in terza rima, the first pastoral in modern literature with a story in it. Niccolo da Correggio called his "Cefalo," in octave rhyme, recited at Ferrara in 1486, also a story-" Favola ”—and in the following years others appeared as rustic comedies, eclogues, or pastoral eclogues. When long, they were divided into acts. And here we are at the source of the taste for pastoral poetry which we shall find after some years coming by way of France to England.

29. These were the days also of Christopher Columbus, born in Italy in 1445. He went to sea about the time when, in 1462, the printers of Mayence were first scattered; and was voyaging northward beyond Iceland, and southward to the coast of Guinea, while the printer's press was being first set up in sundry capitals of Europe.

The short reign of Edward V., in 1483, from April 9 to June 25, and the reign of Richard III. (1483—1485), yielded no work of any mark to English literature. But in 1483 Luther and Raffaelle were born.

During the early part of the reign of Henry VII. (1485-1509) the New World was discovered. Sebastian Cabot, born at Bristol, the son of a Venetian pilot, was but twenty years old when, on a voyage with his father and two brothers in the service of Henry VII., for the discovery and occupation of new lands, he first saw the mainland of America, in 1497. Columbus, in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, had found for Spain in 1492 the West India Islands. On his third voyage in search of new lands and their wealth, in 1498, he saw the main. land of America, which had been seen by the Cabots in 1497, and which was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, who did not visit it till 1499. "Spain, that used to be called poor, is now the most wealthy of kingdoms," Columbus wrote; but in his old age he had for one ornament of his home the chains in which he had been sent home from Hispaniola by men weary of one who vexed them with restraints of honesty. "For seven years," he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella,

was I at your royal court, where every one to whom the enterprise was mentioned treated it as ridiculous; but now there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer. There is reason to believe that they make the voyage only for plunder, and that they are permitted

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to do so, to the great disparagement of my honour, and the detriment of the undertaking itself. It is right to give God his due, and to receive that which belongs to one's self. . . . I was twenty-eight years old when I came into your highnesses' service, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not grey; my body is infirm, and all that was left to me, as well as to my brothers, has been taken away and sold, even to the frock that I wore, to my great dishonour." So Columbus wrote from the Indies, in July, 1503, when absent on his fourth and last voyage to the New World, the voyage following that from which he had returned in chains. With a pure heart and noble mind he had served the greed of men; and to his death, in 1506, he still found Mammon an ungrateful master.

30. The influence of the capture of Constantinople, in 1453, upon the development of scholarship in Europe was evident in England during the last years of the fifteenth century. The study of Greek was introduced among us first at Oxford, by William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre.

William Grocyn, eldest of a group of English classical scholars, was born at Bristol in 1442, educated at Winchester School, and thence passed to New College. The relation between Winchester and New College remains as of old, for it was in connection with New College that the school had been founded, in 1387, by Bishop William Long-William of Wykeham. William Grocyn became, in 1479, rector of Newton Longville, in Buckinghamshire, and afterwards prebendary of Lincoln. He went to Italy, learnt Greek from Demetrius Chalcondylas and Politian (§ 28), and in 1491 settled at Exeter College, Oxford, as the first teacher of Greek. In 1490 he had exchanged his living for the Mastership of All Hallow's College at Maidstone, where he died in 1522. Grocyn differed from the common fashion as a Greek scholar in giving most of his time to the study not of Plato but of Aristotle, whom he began to translate. He left his papers and part of his property to Linacre, his executor, and William Lily.

Thomas Linacre, born at Canterbury, and about eighteen years younger than Grocyn, was educated at Canterbury and at Oxford, became fellow of All Souls in 1484, and early in the reign of Henry VII. was sent on a mission to the Court of Rome. He stayed by the way at Florence, and, like Grocyn, studied Greek under Demetrius Chalcondylas. After his return he became M.D. of Oxford, read lectures on physic, and taught

Greek and Latin. son, Prince Arthur.

He was physician and tutor to Henry VII.'s

In the year 1500, Grocyn was fifty-eight years old, Linacre about forty. John Fisher, who became in 1504 Bishop of Rochester, was forty-one years old in the year 1500, John Colet was thirty-four, William Lily was over thirty, and Thomas More was a young man of twenty. These men were to be chief promoters of English scholarship at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Scholarship abroad had its best representative in Erasmus, who had come to England in 1497, when he was thirty years old. During 1496 he had been supporting himself in Paris by private teaching. His fame was in the future; and the fame of Oxford, as one of the few places in which Greek could then be learnt, had drawn him to the place. There he not only learnt Greek, but he also found Greek scholars who welcomed him to an enduring friendship.

31. In the year 1500 Michael Angelo was twenty-six years old, and Ariosto twenty-six; Raffaelle was seventeen, and Luther seventeen.

Lorenzo de' Medici had died in 1492 During the latter years of his rule, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano and Governor of Reggio, wrote that poem of "Orlando Innamorato" (Orlando Enamoured) which is of most interest for its relation to the later work of Ariosto. Boiardo died, sixty years old, in 1494, leaving his poem unfinished in his own opinior, and by several cantos more than finished in the opinion of others. This poem dealt more seriously, if less cleverly, than Pulci's "Morgante" with the Charlemagne romance. Boiardo set up Charlemagne's nephew Roland, or Orlando, as true knight enamoured of a fascinating Angelica, who had been brought from the far East to sow dissension among the Christians with whom infidel hosts were contending. Boiardo was succeeded in his command of the fortress of Reggio by Ariosto the father, and in his conduct of the story of Orlando by Ariosto the son, who took up the tale where Boiardo ought to have dropped it, not where he actually did leave off.

32. During those earlier years of the reign of Henry VII., when in Florence Boiardo was giving a new point of departure to the metrical romance of chivalry, the poetical literature of this country was most vigorous in the north. Good poets were then living, who gave the best evidence of their power in the first years of the sixteenth century. John Skelton was about