Cicero’s _Old Age and Friendship_; of proverbs, fables, and classical legends; of statutes of the realm; and the _Game of Chess_, an allegory of civil government. We cannot read down the list of ninety-nine books, including several second and third editions, which Caxton printed, without wonder and respect for the genius and the judgment of the man whose choice of subjects was so wide, so high-minded, moral, religious, and generous, and at the same time so popular. He was indeed, in all senses, the first of English publishers. He died in 1491, occupied (as his chief workman and successor, Wynkyn de Worde, tells us) on the last day of his life in finishing his translation of the _Lives of the Fathers_ from the French. Mr. Blades conjectures, with apparent probability, that his wife was the Mawde Caxton whose burial is recorded in the parish books of St. Margaret’s in 1489, and he adds:— ‘If so, it will explain, in a most interesting manner, the reason why he in that year suspended printing the _Fayts of Arms_ until he had finished a new undertaking, _The Arte and Crafte to Die Well_.’ The operation of the silent but never-failing laws which govern the growth and progress of our national life, seems to be sustained and directed in certain epochs of our history by great men who have yet themselves been made what they are by those very laws. Among such laws are the ideals of chivalry in its twofold aspect of self-sacrifice and of self-assertion. And not least among the men who have given to the spirit of chivalry its special English forms in which the sense of duty and zeal in the redress of wrongs are characteristic, stand Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton. §2. THE TEXT, AND ITS SEVERAL EDITIONS. The first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among the finest specimens of Caxton’s printing. One belongs to Mrs. Abby E. Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at the sale of the Osterley library in 1885[26]; and the other to Earl Spencer. The Osterley copy, which is perfect, has the autograph ‘Oxford’ on the first leaf; it was sold with the Harleian Library to Osborne the bookseller, and apparently bought of him for £5 5_s._ by Bryan Fairfax, who sold his library to Mr. Child, maternal ancestor of the Earl of Jersey[27]. The Althorp copy, which was bought at Mr. Lloyd’s sale in 1816 for £320, had eleven leaves deficient; but these were supplied by Mr. Whittaker in fac-simile from the Osterley copy with remarkable skill[28], though on collation with the original I have found many mistakes. This edition, like all Caxton’s books but one, has no title-page; the Prohem or Preface begins at the top of the first page[29].