e
final 'd,' which has the peculiar pump-handle finial seen in that fount.
_The Dictes and Sayinges_ is printed throughout in black ink, in long
lines, twenty-nine to a page, with space left at the beginning of the
chapters for the insertion of initial letters. It has no colophon, but
at the end of the work is an Epilogue, which begins thus:--

'Here endeth the book named the dictes or sayengis | of the
philosophers, enprynted, by me william | Caxton at Westmestre the yere
of our lord .M. | CCCC.LXXVij.'

Caxton followed _The Dictes and Sayinges_ with an edition of Chaucer's
_Canterbury Tales_, a folio of 372 leaves. The size of the book makes it
probable that it was put in hand simultaneously with its predecessor,
and that the chief work of the poet, to whom Caxton paid more than one
eloquent tribute, engaged his attention as soon as he set up his press
in England. He also printed in the same type a Sarum _Ordinale_, known
only by a fragment in the Bodleian, and a number of small quarto tracts,
such as _The Moral Proverbs of Christyne_, which bears date the 20th of
February; a Latin school-book called _Stans Puer ad Mensam_; two
translations from the Distichs of Dionysius Cato, entitled respectively
_Parvus Catho_ and _Magnus Catho_, of which a second edition was
speedily called for; Lydgate's fable of the _Chorl and the Bird_, a
quarto of 10 leaves, which also soon went to a second edition; Chaucer's
_Anelida and Arcite_, and two editions of Lydgate's _The Horse, the
Sheep, and the Goose_.

During the first three years of Caxton's residence at Westminster he
printed at least thirty books. In 1479 he recast type 2 (cited in its
new form by Blades as type 2*), and this he continued to use until 1481.
But about the same time he cast two other founts, Nos. 3 and 4. The
first of these was a large black letter of Missal character, used
chiefly for printing service books, but appearing in the books printed
with type 2* for headlines. With it he printed _Cordyale, or the Four
Last Things_, a folio of 78 leaves, the work being a translation by Earl
Rivers of _Les Quatre Derrenieres Choses Advenir_, first printed in type
2 in the office of Colard Mansion. A second edition of _The Dictes and
Sayinges_ was also printed in this type, while to the year 1478 or 1479
must be ascribed the _Rhetorica Nova_ of Friar Laurence of Savona, a
folio of 124 leaves, long attributed to the press of Cambridge.

After 1479 Caxton began to spac