my cost as
much as 800 pounds of butter. One page of a manuscript book cost the
equivalent of from a dollar to a dollar and a half to-day. When a
member of the Medici family in Florence desired a library, he sent for
a book contractor, who secured forty-five copyists. By rigorous work
for nearly two years they produced two hundred volumes.

[Illustration: BOOK ILLUSTRATION, EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY. _British
Museum_.]

One of the most powerful agencies of the Renaissance was the invention
of printing, which multiplied books indefinitely and made them
comparatively cheap. People were alive with newly awakened curiosity,
and they read books to learn more of the expanding world.

About 1477 William Caxton, who had set up his press at the Almonry,
near Westminster Abbey, printed the first book in England, _The Dictes
and Notable Wish Sayings of the Philosophers_. Among fully a hundred
different volumes that he printed were Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,
Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, and an English translation of Vergil's
_AEneid_.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF CAXTON'S ADVERTISEMENT OF HIS BOOKS._
Bodleian Library, Oxford._]

Malory's Morte d'Arthur.--The greatest prose work of the fifteenth
century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas
Malory, Knight. We know nothing of the author's life; but he has left
as a monument a great prose epic of the deeds of King Arthur and his
Knights of the Round Table. From the various French legends concerning
King Arthur, Malory selected his materials and fashioned than into the
completest Arthuriad that we possess. While his work cannot be called
original, he displayed rare artistic power in arranging, abridging,
and selecting the various parts from different French works.

Malory's prose is remarkably simple and direct. Even in the impressive
scene where Sir Bedivere throws the dying King Arthur's sword into the
sea, the language tells the story simply and shows no straining after
effect:--

"And then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might,
and there came an arm and an hand above the water, and met it, and
caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished
away the hand with the sword in the water... 'Now put me into
the barge,' said the king; and so he did softly. And there received
him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and
in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen