NOTES
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15.
CAXTON'S INTRODUCTION
1. Jerome, Saint and Doctor of the Church, a Dalmatian, lived from about a.d. 340 to 420. In pictures he is usually shown as an ascetic-looking hermit: a Cardinal's hat and a lion are often his attributes.
4. Austin or Augustine, also a Saint and Doctor, a native of Numidia, born 354, died 430. Till middle life he was an eager student, but at the same time a slave to sensual sins, the unworthiness and guilt of which he felt while yet he could not shake himself free. His mother's prayers, his study of S. Paul's epistles, the preaching of S. Ambrose at Milan, and other Christian influences effected his complete conversion. He became a zealous bishop and profound theologian. His greatest work is perhaps The City of God, an elaborate defence of Christianity against pagan mythology and philosophy. It is, in the words of Dean Milman (History of Latin Christianity, iii. 280) "at once the funeral oration of the ancient society and the gratulatory panegyric of the new. The Babylon of the West had passed away . . . in its place had arisen the city of God, the Church of Christ; a new social system had emerged from the ashes of the old; that system was founded by God, was ruled by divine laws, and had the divine promise of perpetuity."
6. "ought to be idle." S. Augustine's views on labour (he wrote a treatise De Opere Monachorum) did not meet the approval of the easy-going Monk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:
"Let Austin have his swynke to him reserved."
16."I ne nyste": I did not know. Double and multiple negatives (of which Caxton's works are full) are found in the earlier and less refined stages of nearly all languages, and sometimes in the later. "Nyste" is, of course, "ne wyste"; similarly "nill"="ne will"=will not.
18. S. Bernard, "the mellifluous Doctor" (1091-1153), a great light of the mediæval Church. He founded a centre of reformed monasticism at Clairvaux—a saintly solitude which he refused to leave for the
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