1350-1477.] ENGLISH LIT E K A T U K E 413 but into these details we have not space to enter. Suffice it to say, that the reason why there is so much halting metre in Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, Harding, Juliana Berners, and other versifiers of the 15th and IGth centuries, would seem to be that, unlike Chaucer, they indulged in much of the syllabic licence of the alliterators, while yet they were not goths enough to adopt their rhythm alto gether. Between the Teutonic and Franco-Latin stools, so to speak, they fell to the ground. A recent writer, to whose labours the history of English literature is much indebted, 1 desiring to mark pictur esquely the appearance of an art which he thought was destined to give the death-blow to medileval superstition, has said that "in the year of the condemnation of Reginald Pecock for declaring that all truth would bear the test of reason and inquiry, John Fust or Faust and Peter Sclioeffer printed a magnificent edition of the Psalter." This shows how easily an attractive antithesis may become a trap for the unwary. The statement made in the protasis of the above sentence is untrue, and that in the apodosis irrelevant. Pecock was not condemned for " declaring that all truth would bear the test of reason and inquiry" (which of course his opponents believed as well as he), but for maintaining, along with other novel opinions, that reason was a better guide than authority as to the matter of revealed religion. Doubtless many would agree with him, but this is a very different proposition from the other. Nor again was the appearance of Fust s Psalter an epoch in the history of printing, as the coincidence of dates, to be worth noticing, would require, for it was both pre ceded and followed by the production of more important works. 3ii- Yet it would not be easy to overrate the effect produced ? f by the invention of printing on the development of litera- in " tare, and the diffusion of those complex influences and arrangements which we call civilization. Language and its devices, as Home Tooke showed in his Diversions of Parley, exist but to promote the rapid interchange of ideas between man and man ; and the device of printing is a further long step in the same march, and a part of the same endeavour. By means of it, books reached in five years countries which before they had not reached in twenty, and readers were multiplied a hundred fold. Through it the speculations of scholars and the theories of philosophers could be quickly brought before the whole body of learned men and philosophers in Europe , hence arose counter speculations and adverse theories, which again obtained publicity with the same rapidity as the first, and to this process there was no limit. Poetry, as being one of the more spontaneous growths of the human mind, the child of passion and imagination, not of controversy, owed comparatively little to the new invention. The literary annals of Spain furnish us with the names of more than a hundred poets who adorned the long reign of John IT. of Castile, ere printing came into being ; while for a century after the discovery, the poetic art was in a feeble and inert condition, both in Spain and England. On the other hand, historical studies of all kinds, since they flourish in proportion to the facilities given of collect ing facts and materials, and printing greatly enhanced these facilities, received a sudden and highly beneficial impulse. <ton The first book certainly known to have been printed in England is the Dicles and Sayings of the Philosophers, a translation from the French ; this was printed by Caxton in 1477, within the precints of the abbey of Westminster. The monks of St Alban s soon set up a printing-press in their great monastery ; and Oxford and Cambridge quickly 1 Prof. H. Morley. followed suit. For fifteen years more Caxton laboured diligently in his vocation, and at his death in 1492 left the art of printing firmly established in England. An examin ation of the list of works which he printed shows what branches of literature were most in esteem in the English society of his day. Professor Craik enumerates forty-five works, which comprise all Caxton s more important typo graphical performances. Of these, thirteen are religious and devotional, twelve are works of romance and chivalry or other prose fiction, seven are historical or legal works, five are English versions of classical authors, five hand books or didactic works, and three editions of English poets. To the first class belong the Golden Legend (a translation of the collection of lives of saints under that name compiled by Jacobus de Yoragine), a Liber Festivalis, or guide to church festivals, a Life of Saint Wynefrid, and several pious books translated from the French. Under the second head fall Malory s English version of the great French prose romances of Arthur, the Ryal Book, a " Troy- book" translated from the French of Baoul Le Fevre, the Boole of Feats of Arms, and the Historye of Reynard the. Foxe, translated from the Flemish. To the historical section belong Trevtsa s version of Higden s Polychronicon, the Chronicles of England by Fabyan, and the statutes passed in the first year of Richard III. Among the classics offered to the English public were versions of the sEncid and of Cicero DeSenedute and DeAmicitia, translated from French versions, and Chaucer s rendering of Boethius s De Consolatione Philosophic. The handbooks contain the Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pisan, a Boke of Good Manners, a Boke for Travellers, &c. The English poets, editions of parts of whose works were printed by Caxton, were, as was to be expected, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. In the period ending with 1350, we saw that the plant of English literature, though putting out some vigorous offshoots, in the poems of Nicolas of Guildford and Robert Manning, was still struggling with great linguistic diffi culties, so that it remained uncertain whether, like Flemish literature in Belgium, it would not have to content itself with appealing to the humbler classes of the people, and leave to France the office of ministering to the intellectual and imaginative wants of all cultivated persons. In 1470 this doubt remained no more ; the question had been finally settled in favour of native genius. England had now a literature in her own speech of which she might be proud, authors whose manner and phraseology supplied models to allied but less advanced nationalities. James I. James I. of Scotland, who was killed in 1436, speaks in the King s Quhair of the trio of English poets in terms of reverence comparable to those which Chaucer himself, in Troylusand Cryseyde, had used of the great poets of antiquity. But this success had only been gained by the wise exercise of that talent for compromise which we English, even to this day, are said to possess almost to a fault. English literature was to employ a language which in its structure and grammar indeed was Teutonic, but was to admit without scruple into its vocabulary thousands of French words which the upper classes, the descendants of the Norman invaders, were in the habit of using. It seemed as if both language and people were destined to hold a position midway between the European nations of Teutonic and those of Latin origin, to be interpreters between the one and the other, and thus to facilitate, for the numerous communities which in due time the English race was to plant over the world, the comprehension of the thoughts and the appreciation of the ideals of both. V. Period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, 1477-1579. The decline of the scholastic philosophy in
England in the 15th century, as indeed in every other