From London by the king was I press'd forth, Be blind with tears, and break o'ercharg'd with grief. Enter a FATHER, who has killed his son, with the body in his arms. Fath. Thou that so stoutly hast resisted me, Give me thy gold, if thou hast any gold; For I have bought it with a hundred blows.- Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee, Throw up thine eye; see, see, what showers arise, What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, K. Hen. Wo above wo! grief more than common grief! O, that my death would stay these ruthful deeds!— O pity, pity, gentle heaven, pity! The red rose and white are on his face, The fatal colors of our striving houses; The one, his purple blood right well resembles; Fath. How will my wife, for slaughter of my son, Son. Was ever son, so rued a father's death? K. Hen. Was ever king so griev'd for subjects' wo? Son. I'll bear thee hence, where I may weep my fill. My heart, sweet boy, shall be thy sepulchre; As Priam was for all his valiant sons. I'll bear thee hence; and let them fight that will, [Exit with the body. K. Hen. Sad-hearted men, much overgone with care, Here sits a king more woful than you are. Alarum. Excursions. Enter QUEEN MARGARET, PRINCE of Prince. Fly, father, fly! for all your friends are fled, Away! for death doth hold us in pursuit. Q. Mar. Mount you, my lord, toward Berwick post amain, Edward and Richard, like a brace of greyhounds Having the fearful flying hare in sight, With fiery eyes, sparkling for very wrath, And bloody steel, grasp'd in their ireful hands, Exe. Away! for vengeance comes along with them; Or else come after, I'll away before. K. Hen. Nay, take me with thee, good sweet Exeter; Whither the queen intends. Forward; away! The First English Printer.—D'Israeli. [From "Amenities of Literature," by Isaac D'Israeli.] [Exeunt. 1. THE ambitious wars of a potent aristocracy inflicted on this country half a century of misery. Our fields were a soil of blood; and maternal England long mourned for victories she obtained over her own children-lord against lord, brother against brother, and the son against the father. Rival administrations alternately dispossess each other by sanguinary conflict; a new monarch attaints the friends of his predecessor; conspiracy rises against conspiracy-scaffold against scaffold; the king is re-enthroned-the king perished in the Tower; York is triumphant-and York is annihilated. . . . . 2. During this dread interval, all things about us were thrown back into a state of the rudest infancy; the illiteracy' of the age approached to barbarism; the evidences of history were destroyed; there was such a paucity of readers that no writers were found to commemorate contemporary events. Indeed, had there been any, who could have ventured to arbitrate between such contradictory accounts, when every party had to tell their own tale? Oblivion, not history, seemed to be the consolation of those miserable times. 3. It was at such an unhappy era that the new-found art of printing was introduced into England by an English trader, who, for thirty years, had passed his life in Flanders, conversant with no other languages than were used in those countries. Our literature was interested in the intellectual character of our first English printer. A powerful mind might, by the novel and mighty instrument of thought, have created a national taste, or have sown that seed of curiosity, without which no knowledge can be reared. Such a genius might have anticipated, by a whole century, that general passion for sound literature which was afterward to distinguish our country. But neither the times nor the man were equal to such a glorious advancement. 4. The first printed book in the English language was not printed in England. It is a translation of Raoul de Fevre's "Recueil des Histoires de Troye" [Collection of the Histories of Troy famed in its own day as the most romantic history, and in ours, for the honor of bibliography, romantically valued at the cost of a thousand guineas. This first monument of English printing issued from the press at Cologne, in 1471, where Caxton first became initiated in "the noble mystery and craft" of printing, when printing was yet truly a "mystery;" and Caxton himself did not import the art which was to effect such an intellectual revolution, till a year or two afterward, on his return home. The first printer, it is evident, had no other conception of the machine he was about to give the nation, than as an ingenious contrivance, or a cheap substitute for costly manuscripts-possibly he might, in his calculating prudence, even be doubtful of its success.. 5. Caxton did not extend his views beyond those of a mercantile printer and an indifferent translator. As a writer, he had reason to speak with humility of the style of his vernacular versions. His patroness, the Lady Margaret, sister to Edward the Fourth, and Duchess of Burgundy, after inspecting some quires of the translation of the "History of Troy," returned them, finding, as Caxton ingenuously acknowledges, "some default in his English, which she commanded him to amend." 6. The "curious" prices now given among the connoisseurs of our earliest typography", for their "Caxtons," as his Gothic works are thus honorably distinguished, have induced some, conforming to traditional prejudice, to appreciate by the same fanciful value "the Caxtonian style." But though we are not acquainted with the "defaults" which offended the Lady Margaret, nor with the "terms which were not easily understood," nor with "the sentences improperly Englished," as a later printer declared, we shall not, I suspect, fall short of the mark if we conclude that the style of a writer destitute of a literary education, a prolix genius with a lax verbosity, and almost a foreigner in his native idiom', could not attain to any skill of felicity in the maternal tongue. 7. As a printer without erudition', Caxton would naturally accommodate himself to the tastes of his age, and it was therefore a consequence that no great author appears among the "Caxtons." The most glorious issues of his press were a Chaucer and a Gower, wherein he was simply a printer. The rest of his works are translations of fabulous histories, and those spurious writings of the monkish ages ascribed by ignorant transcribers to some ancient sage. He appears frequently to have been at a loss what book to print, and to have accidentally chosen the work in hand. . . 8. The trivial productions from Caxton's press, romantic or religious legends, and treatises on hunting and hawking, and the moralities of the game of chess, with Reynard the Fox, were more amusing to the ignorant readers of his country; but the national genius was little advanced by a succession of "merveillous workes;" nor would the crude unformed tastes of the readers be matured by stimulating their inordinate appetites. The first printing-press in England did not serve to raise the national taste out of its barbarous infancy. Caxton was not a genius to soar beyond his age, but he had the industry to keep pace with it, and with little judgment and less learning, he found no impediment in his selection of authors or his progress in translation. [The earliest work printed in England by Caxton is that entitled “The Game and Playe of the Chesse, translated out of the French, fynysshed the last day of Marche, 1474.” A second edition of this work was the first English book illustrated with woodcats. Sixty-five works, chiefly translations, are assigned to the pen and the press of Caxton, who, during seventeen years, and until nearly fourscore years of age, continued to work at his press, inking the types and working the lever himself. His death occurred in 1491.1 |