Caxton, mindful of his commercial interests and the taste of his readers, left the glory of restoring the classical writers of antiquity, which he could not read, to the learned printers of Italy.[2] The Orator of Cicero, the histories of Herodotus and Polybius, the ethics of Seneca, and the elaborate volumes of St. Austin, were some of the rich fruits of the early typography of the German printers who had conveyed their new art to the Neapolitan monastery of Subiaco. Our English printer, indeed, might have heard of their ill-fortune, when, in a petition to the Pope, they sent forth this cry--"Our house is full of proof-sheets, but we have nothing to eat!" 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. Our earliest printed works consist of these translations of French translations; and the historian of our poetry considered that this very circumstance, which originated in the general illiteracy of the times, was more favourable to our vernacular literature than would have been the publication of Roman writers in their original language. Had it not been for these French versions, Caxton could not have furnished any of his own. The multiplication of English copies multiplied English readers, and when at length there was a generation of readers, an English press induced many to turn authors who were only qualified to write in their native tongue. Venerable shade of Caxton! the award of the tribunal of posterity is a severe decision, but an imprescriptible law! Men who appear at certain eras of society, however they be lauded for what they have done, are still liable to be censured for not doing what they ought to have done. Patriarch of the printing-press! who to thy last and dying day withdrew not thy hand from thy work, it is hard that thou shouldst be amenable to a law which thy faculties were not adequate to comprehend; surely thou mayst triumph, thou simple man! amid the echoes of thy "Caxtonians" rejoicing over thy Gothic leaves--but the historian of the human mind is not the historian of typography. FOOTNOTES: [1] "State Papers of Henry the Eighth," vol. i. 589.