Gutenberg's career was dashed with many lights and shadows, but it closed in peace. In 1465, the Archbishop-elector of Mentz appointed him one of his courtiers, with the same allowance of clothing as the remainder of the nobles attending his court, and all other privileges and exemptions. It is probable that from this time he abandoned the practice of his new invention. The date of his death is uncertain; but there is documentary evidence extant which proves that it occurred before February 24, 1468. He was interred in the church of the Recollets at Mentz, and the following epitaph was composed by his kinsman Adam Gelthaus:-- "D. O. M. S. "Joanni Gesnyfleisch, artis impressoriae repertori, de omni natione et lingua optime merito, in nominis sui memoriam immortalem Adam Gelthaus posuit. Ossa ejus in ecclesia D. Francisci Moguntina feliciter cubant." II.--WILLIAM CAXTON. During the last thirty or forty years of the fifteenth century, while printing was becoming gradually more and more practised on the Continent, and the presses of Mentz, Bamberg, Cologne, Strasburg, Augsburg, Rome, Venice, and Milan, were sending forth numbers of Bibles, and various learned and theological works, chiefly in Latin, an English merchant, a man of substance and of no little note in Chepe, appeared at the court of the Duke of Burgundy at Bruges, to negotiate a commercial treaty between that sovereign and the king of England; which accomplished, the worthy ambassador seems to have liked the place and the people so well, and to have been so much liked in return, that for some years afterwards he took up his residence there, holding some honourable, easy appointment in the household of the Duchess of Burgundy. This was William Caxton, who here ripened, if he did not acquire, his love of literature and scholarship, and began, from hatred of idleness, to take pen in hand himself. "When I remember," says he, in his preface to his first work, a translation of a fanciful "Recueil des Histoires de Troye," "that every man is bounden by the commandment and counsel of the wise man to eschew sloth and idleness, which is mother and nourisher of vices, and ought to put himself into virtuous occupation and business, then I, having no great charge or occupation, following the said counsel, took a French book, and read therein many strange marvellous histories. And for so much as this book was new and late made, and drawn into French, and never seen in our English tongue, I thought in myself, it should be a good business to translate it into our English, to the end that it might be had as well in the royaume of England as in other lands, and also to pass therewith the time; and thus concluded in myself to begin this said work, and forthwith took pen and ink, and began boldly to run forth, as blind Bayard, in this present work."