The esteem with which books were regarded by priests and scholars during the fourteenth century was shared by men of wealth, who coveted books, not so much for their contents as for their pictures, and as evidences of wealth and culture. A remarkable impulse had been given to literature and to the making of books by the troubadours of Southern France. Their songs of love and devotion to women, their encomiums of chivalry, and stories of battle and adventure, which were of their own age, fresh and full of life, and untainted by the influence of withered classical models, had most unbounded popularity in every grade of society. Uncultivated people, who would have yawned over the reading of _Homer_ or the _Odes of Horace_, would listen with a keen delight to the songs of a Provençal minstrel, or to the reading of romances about Charlemagne and his Paladins, about Arthur and Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. To men who had regarded books only as dull treatises about theology, these romances were revelations of an unsuspected attractiveness in literature. How much these romances increased the respect for books, and led to the making of new copies, and to a more general knowledge of reading and writing, cannot be exactly stated; but their influence on the people was vastly greater than that of the books of the schools. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, books about love and chivalry constituted the greater part of the secular literature of Europe. The most popular books of Caxton, the first English printer, and of the early printers of Paris, were of this character. To the ladies of France, the books of love and song were especially attractive. It was largely through their admiration that the workmanship of a new order of book-makers came in fashion. [p166] To please their dainty tastes, copies were made with refinements of calligraphy never before attempted; the unwieldy sizes of folio and quarto were supplanted by small and handy duodecimos, and bindings of a more delicate character were introduced.