eving of it, praying him
to take it in gree of me William Caxton, his poor servant, and that it
like him to remember my fee, and I shall pray unto Almighty God for his
long life and welfare, and after this short and transitory life to come
into everlasting joy in heaven, the which he send to him and to me and
unto all them that shall read and hear this said book, that for the love
and faith of whom all these holy saints hath suffered death and passion.
Amen.'

Few publishers since Caxton's days have let us so far into their
secrets, and we can but hope that his patron really took 'a reasonable
quantity' of the edition (another was published in a few years, so he
probably did), and that the bucks and the does furnished many jolly
dinners. Elsewhere in these prefaces Caxton tells us how he was induced
to take up the art of printing, narrates the trouble, in which he has
had successors, in getting a good text of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_,
pokes fun at English ladies and at another of his patrons, the Earl of
Rivers, and sets down what is still one of the best criticisms ever
penned of Malory's _King Arthur_. With the mention of that noble work it
is well to finish this brief sketch of our fifteenth-century literature.
It is too well known, too easily accessible, for any snippets to be
quoted from it here. But with the English version of Mandeville at the
beginning of our period, and Malory's _Arthur_ completed in 1469 and
published in 1483, it is evident that we can lay claim to two
masterpieces which have not yet lost their hold on modern readers. The
simplicity and feeling of _Everyman_ has lately obtained recognition. I
hope that, when boys and girls are taught a little more of their own
language, the play of _Max the Sheepstealer_ may win even greater
popularity, for it is an ideal play for children to act. If we throw in
'Chevy Chace' and the 'Nut Brown Maid' and the 'Robin Hood Ballads,' we
shall not be lacking for poetry. For the interest which we now seek in a
realistic novel we might well go to the Paston Letters. There are not a
few nations of Europe which might be well pleased if they could show,
century by century, as good a record as this. It is only in fact the
ill-fortune which placed it midway between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and
our own perversity which persists in associating it mainly with Lydgate
and Hoccleve, that causes us to contemn this particular century as
dull.

Footnotes:

[1] Spring.