anion had discovered an
empire which presented this admirable quality: the island of Utopia, or
the country of "Nowhere." This country became immediately famous all
over Europe, so much so that Pantagruel would not look to any other
place for immigrants to people his newly conquered kingdom of Dispodie.
There he transported "Utopians to the number of 9,876,543,210 men," says
Rabelais, with his usual care for exact numbers, "without speaking of
women and little children." He did so to "refresh, people, and adorn the
said country otherwise badly enough inhabited and desert in many
places."[19] His acting in this manner was only natural, for, as is well
known, connections existed between his family and the Utopians, his own
mother Badebec, the wife of Gargantua, being "daughter to the king of
the Amaurotes in Utopia."[20]

A hundred years later, something of this want of confidence in the
future of English prose still lingered. Bacon, after having employed it
in his essays and treatises, was seized with anxiety and kept in his pay
secretaries with whose help he meant to translate all his works into
Latin, in order to assure himself of their permanence.

III.

Some years before Sir Thomas More wrote his "Utopia," an Englishman, who
had long lived abroad and had there learnt a new industry, unknown in
his own land, returned to England and settled in Westminster. He and his
trade were destined to exercise a very important influence on the
diffusion of literature, and especially on the development of romances.
His art was printing, and his name was Caxton. We can judge of the
amazement he produced among his countrymen by his new art, from his own
wonder; one of his prefaces shows clearly enough how extraordinary his
performance seemed to himself: "And for as moche, says he, as in the
wrytyng of the same my penne is worn, myn hande wery & not stedfast, myn
eyen dimed with overmoche lokyng on the whit paper & my corage not so
prone & redy to laboure as hit hath ben & that age crepeth on me dayly &
febleth all the bodye, & also be cause I have promysid to diverse
gentilmen & to my frendes to addresse to hem as hastely as I myght this
sayd book, therfore I have practysed & lerned at my grete charge &
dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte after the maner & forme as
ye may here see, & is not wreton with penne & ynke as other bokes ben,
to thende that every man may have them attones, ffor all the bookes of
this storye nam