Few publishers since Caxton's days have let us so far into their secrets, and we can but hope that his patron really took 'a reasonable quantity' of the edition (another was published in a few years, so he probably did), and that the bucks and the does furnished many jolly dinners. Elsewhere in these prefaces Caxton tells us how he was induced to take up the art of printing, narrates the trouble, in which he has had successors, in getting a good text of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, pokes fun at English ladies and at another of his patrons, the Earl of Rivers, and sets down what is still one of the best criticisms ever penned of Malory's _King Arthur_. With the mention of that noble work it is well to finish this brief sketch of our fifteenth-century literature. It is too well known, too easily accessible, for any snippets to be quoted from it here. But with the English version of Mandeville at the beginning of our period, and Malory's _Arthur_ completed in 1469 and published in 1483, it is evident that we can lay claim to two masterpieces which have not yet lost their hold on modern readers. The simplicity and feeling of _Everyman_ has lately obtained recognition. I hope that, when boys and girls are taught a little more of their own language, the play of _Max the Sheepstealer_ may win even greater popularity, for it is an ideal play for children to act. If we throw in 'Chevy Chace' and the 'Nut Brown Maid' and the 'Robin Hood Ballads,' we shall not be lacking for poetry. For the interest which we now seek in a realistic novel we might well go to the Paston Letters. There are not a few nations of Europe which might be well pleased if they could show, century by century, as good a record as this. It is only in fact the ill-fortune which placed it midway between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and our own perversity which persists in associating it mainly with Lydgate and Hoccleve, that causes us to contemn this particular century as dull. Footnotes: [1] Spring. [2] Whispering. [3] Printed by him in 1894 in a 'Festschrift' in honour of Professor Hildebrand. [4] To be carefully distinguished from the so-called Coventry Plays of Cotton MS., Vespasian, D. viii., whose highly doubtful connection with Coventry rests solely on a note of Cotton's librarian. [5] It would be convenient if they could be called the Cotton Plays, as the Wakefield cycle has been called after the Towneley family. [6] See p. 316. Stage-plays were acted in the summer, interludes in the winter, the cost of hiring dresses being apparently from three to five times as great for a stage-play as for an interlude. My own interpretation is that the distinction has nothing to do with the plays acted, but solely to the place of performance, interludes being acted indoors and stage-plays in the open air, where the dresses were exposed to greater damage. [7] Prohemye to _Polychronicon_, _ad fin._ [8] The argument as I understand it runs as follows:--