uch complacence the colophon to this strange volume. He left three
blank leaves between 1493 and the Day of Judgment whereon the reader
might record what remained of human history. It is indeed rather the
last voice of the middle ages than the first voice of the Renaissance
that speaks to us out of these clear, black, handsome pages that were
pulled damp from the press four hundred and twenty-eight years ago on
the fourth of last June. At first reading one is moved to mirth, then to
wonder, then perhaps to disgust, but last of all to the haunting
melancholy of Omar the tent-maker when he sings

"When you and I behind the veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last."

As to worthy Hartman Schedel, God rest his soul, one wonders whether he
has yet learned that Columbus discovered America. He had not yet heard
of it when he finished his book, though Columbus had returned to Spain
three months before. O most lame and impotent conclusion! But the
fifteenth century, though it had an infinite childlike curiosity, had no
nose for news. Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed
up beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noah
building the ark while Columbus was fitting out the Santa Maria for a
second voyage. Such is mankind, blind and deaf to the greatest things.
We know not the great hour when it strikes. We are indeed most
enthralled by the echoing chimes of the romantic past when the future
sounds its faint far-off reveille upon our unheeding ears. The multitude
understands noon and night; only the wise man understands the morning.

[Illustration]

And now finally, what of William Caxton? The father of English printing
had been for many years an English merchant residing in Bruges when his
increasing attention to literature led him to acquire the new art of
printing. He had already translated from the French the Histories of
Troy, and was preparing to undertake other editorial labors when he
became associated with Colard Mansion, a Bruges printer. From Mansion he
learned the art and presumably purchased his first press and type. Six
books bearing Caxton's imprint were published at Bruges between 1474 and
1476, though it is possible that the actual printing was done by Mansion
rather than by Caxton himself. In 1476 Caxton set up the first printing
shop in England, in a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey.
Between that date and his