The historian Gibbon makes it a cause of special regret that, in the choice of his authors, Caxton “was reduced to comply with the vicious taste of his readers; to gratify his nobles with treatises on heraldry, hawking, and the game of chess, and to amuse the popular credulity with romances of fabulous knights and legends of fabulous saints. The father of [English] printing expresses a laudable desire to elucidate the history of his country; but instead of publishing the Latin Chronicle of Radulphus Higden, he could only venture on the English version by John de Trevisa.... The world is not indebted to England for a single _first_ edition of a classic author.”[56] Blades, taking up the cudgels for his hero, points out that Caxton very properly made a careful study of the wants of the public which was about him. It was essential for his purposes that the business should be placed on an assured foundation and should be made profitable. Caxton tells us in the preface to his _Charles the Great_, that he earned his living by his printing-office. It seems probable that he could have brought with him from Bruges no further property than was required to get his printing business into working shape, and it appears that at his death he left for his heirs very little beyond his presses, his type, and the remainders of the editions of his books. It is probable that the knowledge of Latin, even among the circles that were interested in literature, must have been at this time much less general in England than on the Continent, and it is certain that the interest in theological writings continued during the century following to be very much smaller with Englishmen than with the Germans reached by the presses of Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Basel. It is, I judge, generally accepted that during the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century, the standard of general cultivation was lower, and the extent of learning and of literary interests more limited in England than in Italy or the Low Countries. “The demand in England in the fifteenth century,” says Blades, “was not for Bibles in the vernacular, nor for Horace nor Homer, whose writings very few could read in the original texts; but the clergy wanted service books, and Caxton accordingly provided them with Psalters, Commemorations, and Directories; the preachers wanted sermons, and were supplied with _The Golden Legend_; the ‘prynces, lordes, barons, knyghtes, and gentilmen,’ were craving for ‘joyous and pleysaunt historyes’ of chivalry, and the Press at the Red Pale produced a fresh romance nearly every year. Poetry and history required for their appreciation a more advanced standard of education [than at this time obtained in England], and of these, therefore, the issue was comparatively scanty.”