However, I have no intention here of tracing the history of English printers, and have only said thus much of Caxton, because he presents us with an admirable example of an intelligent Englishman of the middle class—a practical persevering man, full of the healthy energy which belongs to a life of labour; a vigorous, homely writer who desired, in his day, to serve his country in so far as he had the needful “cunning;” whose plain broad sense is illumined by a ray of piety, and warmed into a touch of generous enthusiasm, which makes his name more dear and venerable to us than that of many a profounder scholar. Is it fancy or partiality which makes one detect in the fair large type that he uses, so clear and readable, a reflection of his own simple and genuine character; a character which, making allowance for the difference of station, reminds us of that of the great Alfred, to whose written language also that of Caxton bears a remarkable resemblance.
He died in the year 1492, at the age of eighty, having two years previously completed his translation of “The Craft how to Die Well,” from which the following is an extract:—“When it is so, that what a man maketh or doeth, it is made to come to some end, and if the thing be good and well made, it must needs come to good end; then, by better and greater reason, every man ought to intend in such wise to live in this world in keeping the commandments of God that he may come to a good end. And then out of this world, full of wretchedness and tribulation, he may go to heaven unto God and His saints, into joy perdurable.”
Two years after writing these lines he was laid to rest in the Church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, not far from the spot where for eighteen years he had carried on his noble and useful labours.
CHAPTER XX.
THE RENAISSANCE AT FLORENCE.
A.D. 1400 TO 1492.
Eastern travellers tell us of certain richly-irrigated soils in tropical lands, whereon the seeds that are cast spring up in a single night, covering, as if by magic, vasts plains, which before appeared barren wastes, with a mantle of tender green. Something like this was the rapid fertilisation exhibited in the world of letters after the death of Petrarch. More than a century, indeed, had to elapse before Italy could produce any names fit to compete with those of Dante, Petrarch, or Bocaccio; but the freshly-awakened enthusiasm for ancient learning, to which the writings of the two latter had so largely contributed, gave birth to a generation of scholars whose labours communicated a new direction to European studies. They did not leave behind them, as monuments of their genius, epic poems or philosophical discoveries, but they disinterred forgotten manuscripts, restored their corrupted texts, revived the study of Greek, and at the same time made known to Western Christendom the works of the great Greek authors by means of their own laborious Latin translations. They were, in short, a generation of grammarians, critics, and pedagogues, and were the instruments of achieving an intellectual revolution hardly less momentous than the religious and political revolutions which were to follow in after years.
The watered soil and the fruitful seed did not fail to be cherished by the sun of princely favour. The fifteenth century was not more remarkable for its learned men, than for its noble patrons of learning. In Naples there was Alphonsus of Arragon, who, in the midst of his warlike campaigns, had the Commentaries of Cæsar read to him daily, and whose displeasure against the Florentine Republic was appeased by the timely present of a copy of Livy. When Gianozzo Manetti was sent to him as ambassador from Florence, and delivered to him his opening oration, the king, out of respect to so great a scholar, would not so much as raise his hand to brush away a troublesome fly; and on one occasion, when Manetti had joined in a dispute which Alphonsus was carrying on with certain learned men of his court on the subject of the Holy Trinity, he so won the royal heart by his skill and eloquence that the king exclaimed, “Had I but a single loaf, I would divide it with Gianozzo!” He was one of the greatest book collectors of his time, and loved to surround himself with scholars, such as Antony of Palermo, commonly known as Panormita, who is said to have cured his royal master of a fever by reading to him the Life of Alexander, by Quintus Curtius. Perhaps it was after his recovery that Alphonsus despatched Panormita to Venice for the singular purpose of begging from the Venetian senators an arm of the Roman historian, with which classical relic he triumphantly returned to Naples. Most of the other men of letters who then flourished in Italy, such as Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, and George of Trebizond, were at one time or other attached to his court, and magnificently rewarded for their literary labours; and Pius II., in his “Description of Europe,” numbers Alphonsus himself among the philosophers of the day, and says that he could discourse both learnedly and gracefully on the most abstruse theological questions.