by Caxton-the 'History of Troy,' and six others, having probably been printed by him abroad before his resettlement in his native country.

Caxton's printing-press gave an immense impulse to writing in the English tongue. In the first ten years after its establishment, probably more English was written for publication than had been written in the two preceding centuries. His press gave to the world no less than sixty-four books, nearly all in English.

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His publications were mostly translations from French and Latin, many of them made by himself. They include religious books of a popular cast- Pilgrimage of the Soul,' 'The Golden Legend' (Lives of the Saints), The Life of St Catherine of Sens: ' books of romance-Malory's Mort d'Artur,' ' Godfrey of Boloyn,' ( The Book of the Order of Chivalry,' 'The History of the Noble, Right Valiant, and Right Worthy Knight Paris, and of the Fair Vienne' and some of the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. Caxton's books are a good index to the taste of the time, because he published as a man of business, not for the learned, but for the general reader and book-buyer. He was a fluent translator himself, not careful of his style, like Bishop Pecock, for example, but rough and ready, following his French originals in idiom. He spoke with quite a courtly air about the rude old English of the previous century, and was sharply taken to task by Skelton for his presumption. His own English differs somewhat in diction, but not so much in the words used as in the greater copiousness of expression and greater abundance of French idiom.

Robert Fabyan, or Fabian, who died in 1512, is usually counted among the authors of this century. His 'Concordaynce of Stories,' generally known as Fabyan's Chronicle, is the first attempt to write history in English prose. An alderman and a sheriff of London, he seems to have pursued literature to the damage of his business; for in 1502 he withdrew from office on the ground of poverty. In all likelihood he had composed his Chronicle after his retirement from the cares of official life.

The Concordance, compiled from older sources, as the name indicates, narrates the history of Britain from the landing of Brutus the Trojan down to 1485. It is most minute in the detail of facts and fictions, making no attempt to distinguish between great events and small. One of its most authentic records is a full and particular account of the successive Lord Mayors of London. The book was not published till 1516, four years after the author's death.

One or two other names of this century have been preserved. Juliana Berners (of uncertain date, supposed 1390-1460) deserves mention as the first of her sex to publish a book in English. She

JOHN BOURCHIER.-SIR THOMAS MOR

189 was prioress of Sopewell Nunnery, near St Albans, was-like the gentlewomen of the period-fond of hawking and hunting, and wrote a treatise on these sports. Sir Thomas Malory (fl. 1470) is known as the translator and compiler of the History of King Arthur, printed by Caxton in 1485. To this century belong also translations of various romances from the French, occupied chiefly with the acts of the Round Table Knights and the Seer Merlin; also the Paston Letters, supposed date, 1422.

FIRST HALF OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

With the sixteenth century our prose literature begins a new era, though the writers are still far from being of any use as models of style. In spite of the encouragement given to English writing by the establishment of printing, some of the most distinguished authors of the time wrote chiefly in Latin, being ambitious of a wider audience than the English-reading public. The high-minded Bishop FISHER, who in 1535, at the age of seventy-five, was put to death for denying the king's ecclesiastical supremacy, wrote copiously in Latin in defence of the Catholic tenets, and left only a few sermons in English. Bishop BALE, a generation later (14951563), a champion on the Protestant side, is known chiefly by his 'Lives of Eminent English Writers, from Japhet down to 1559,' a work written in Latin. He wrote in English some bitter controversial tracts, and an account of the examination and death of the Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle. Sir Thomas More wrote his Utopia' in Latin. Still, this century begins with a greatly increased activity in the production of original English works.

John Bourchier, Lord Berners, 1474-1532, is known chiefly as the translator of Froissart's Chronicles.' " He was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Governor of Calais, and undertook the translation, which was published in 1523, at the request of the king. It was reprinted in 1812 in the series of English Chronicles. Berners made one or two other translations from French and Spanish. As an educated man and a courtier, he wrote without pedantry the best English of the time; and by that time, chiefly under Italian influence, a much more ornate, balanced, and compact style began to come into use. If we compare any of Caxton's translations with Berners's Froissart, we are struck at once with a decided advance in point of form. By the end of Henry VIII.'s reign, we can distinctly see the stylistic tendency which reached an extravagant height in the prose of John Lyly.

Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535, first layman Chancellor of England, author of 'Utopia,' is perhaps the first of our writers whose prose displays any genius; and his 'Life of Edward V.' is pronounced by Mr Hallam to be "the first example of good English

language, pure and perspicuous, well chosen, without vulgarisms or pedantry."

More's life is well known; he ranks with Sir Philip Sidney as one of the most popular characters in our history. His father was Sir John More, a judge of the Court of King's Bench. Admitted

as a page to the household of Cardinal Morton at the age of fifteen, he was sent thence to Oxford, where he made the acquaintance of Erasmus. Under his pleasant exterior there was a vein of gravity and asceticism; and after leaving Oxford he had thoughts of becoming a monk. This desire passed away; he settled down to the practice of the law, soon rose to distinction, was made undersheriff of London, and obtained a seat in Parliament in 1504. He offended Henry VII. by opposing a subsidy; and, retiring from public life, probably busied himself with his Life of Edward V.,' till the accession of Henry VIII. let him resume his profession. With Henry he became a great favourite, and in 1529, on the fall of Wolsey, was made Chancellor. A stanch adherent to the Church of Rome, he is said to have practised in his chancellorship severities against the Reformers very inconsistent with the theory of the 'Utopia.' When Henry broke with Rome, the Chancellor would not follow him, and suffered death rather than take an oath affirming the validity of the King's marriage with Anne Boleyn. He was beheaded in 1535, acting up to his Utopian precept that a man should meet death with cheerfulness.

The 'Utopia,' written, as we have said, in Latin, was first printed in 1516 at Louvain. His principal English work is the Life and Reign of Edward V. and of his Brother, and of Richard III.,' our first prose composition worthy of the title of history. He was also a voluminous writer of controversy, publishing more than 1000 pages folio against Tyndale; and a letter to his wife that has chanced to be preserved is often quoted.

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The Utopia,' though written in Latin, is always reckoned as an English work, and is the chief support of More's place in English literature. The dramatic setting of the work is done with great ingenuity and humorous circumstantiality. More professes to be only a transcriber; he simply writes down what he remembers of a conversation with a restless traveller, Raphael Hythloday. Ralph had met in his travels with the commonwealth of Utopia (Nowhere), and More draws him out to give an account of it. Ralph is thus an earlier Teufelsdroeckh, as Utopia is an earlier Weissnichtwo. Under the dramatic guise, disclaiming all responsibility for the opinions, More utters freely political advice that might have been unpalatable but for its witty accompaniments of time, place, and circumstance.

The work is full of graphic personal descriptions, and of humour that has a freshness almost unique after such a lapse of time.

As

a small sample of his picturesque description, take the first appear ance of Hythloday. On leaving church at Antwerp one day, sauntering out

"I chanced to espy this foresaid Peter (Giles) talking with a certain stranger, a man well stricken in age, with a black sunburnt face, a long beard, and a cloak cast homely about his shoulders, whom by his favour and apparel forthwith I judged to be a mariner."

A fair specimen of his humour is his pretended difficulties in finding out exactly where Utopia lay. He let off Raphael without minute questioning, so occupied was he with the peculiarities of the place; then he wrote to his friend Giles, who found the traveller, and asked the particulars of latitude and longitude; but unfortunately at the critical moment a servant came and whispered Raphael, and when the story was taken up again after this interruption, some person in the room had a fit of coughing, so that Giles lost "certain of the words." Throughout Robinson's translation of the Utopia,' the translator is so full of admiration that he cannot refrain from marginal remarks, such as, “ O wittie head," a prettie fiction and a wittie," "mark this well."

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Of late years the 'Utopia' has been sometimes quoted as containing lessons for the present day. As a matter of fact, More gives us no lesson that we do not get from living preachers in forms more directly adapted to our time-the main pleasure in reading him apart from his humour and picturesqueness is the surprise of finding in the 'Utopia' doctrines that have been preached in these latter days and considered novel. Curiously enough, the chief author of our time anticipated by the "merry, jocund, and pleasant" More, is the grimly humorous, vehement, and defiant "Seer of Chelsea," Mr Carlyle. The difference of manner makes the coincidence of matter all the more striking. We find realised in the Utopia' Mr Carlyle's main political doctrines his hatred of idleness and love of steady industry, his model aristocracy, his " Captains of Industry," his treatment of malefactors, and his grand specific for an overcrowded country— emigration. The Utopians are a sober, industrious, thrifty people; jewellery and fine clothes they put away with childhood; they have no idle rich, they leave hunting to the butchers; the chief duty of their magistrates the Syphogrants is, "to see and take heed that no man sit idle;" they enslave their malefactors, give them a peculiar dress, cut off the tips of their ears, hire them out to work, and punish desertion with death: when their children become too numerous, they found a colony.

All this is a curious anticipation of the 'Latter-Day Pamphlets'; and in More we meet with many other things that we are accustomed to think peculiarly modern. He makes some pleasant play

on the pedantic worship of antiquity, and the over-honoured "wisdom of our ancestors." He brings against the capital punishment of theft the same argument that Macaulay, in the Indian Penal Code, urged against the capital punishment of rape. Some years ago we heard much about the depopulation of the Highlands of Scotland to make deer-parks: More has a similar complaint to make; in his day the high price of English wool tempted landlords to eject husbandmen, and turn arable land into sheep-pastures.

The 'Utopia' was first translated by Ralph Robinson in 1551. It was again translated by Bishop Burnet in 1684. Both translations have often been reprinted, and others have been made. Robinson's translation is included in Arber's series of 'English Reprints,' 1869.

If we compare Robinson's translation with the original or with Burnet's translation, we are struck with a peculiarity characteristic of our literature up to and including the age of Elizabeth. Robinson seldom translates an epithet with a single word; he repeats two or even three words that are nearly synonymous. It would seem as if he distrusted the expressiveness of the new language, and sought to convey the Latin meaning by showing it in as many aspects as our language permitted. "Plain, simple, and homely," "merry, jocund, and pleasant," "disposition or conveyance" of the matter, might be explained in this way. But the greater number of the tautologies are the incontinence arising from want of art; couples are often used where the meaning of one would be amply apparent: thus-"I grant and confess," "I reckon and account,' """tell and declare," ," "win and get," and so forth.

Sir Thomas Elyot, 1487-1546, a man of admired integrity and of a genial didactic turn, who was employed by Henry VIII. on two of his most important embassies, was a miscellaneous writer of considerable range. His most famous work is 'The Governor,' which deals chiefly with the subject of education. Besides this he wrote a medical and dietetic work, 'The Castle of Health,' composed 'Bibliotheca Eliota' (probably a work on the choice of books), and pretended to translate from the Greek a work called 'The Image of Governance.'

With More and Elyot may be mentioned their friend, though considerably their junior, John Leland (1506-1552), scholar and antiquary, author of 'The Itinerary.'

Edward Hall, 1500-1547, is often coupled with Fabyan as one of the two beginners of English prose history. The title of his work is 'The Union of the two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and Yorke.' There is no particular reason for coup ing him with Fabyan. More comes between them as a historian with his Edward V. Hall was a man of better education than Fabyan; studied at Cambridge, went to the bar, and rose to be one of the