Ordered these unhappy Princes to be laid
Amongst the monuments of their Predecessors,
_Anno Dom_ 1678, in the 30th year of his Reign.

The mean and ugly little urn, which was the only monument that "most
compassionate Prince" could afford to the memory of these two children,
stands at the end of the north aisle of Henry the Seventh's Chapel,
close to Queen Elizabeth's tomb.

But let us turn from this dismal theme to something much more cheerful.
While little Richard Duke of York was in Sanctuary with his mother, he
must have often run across under the shadow of the great elms that stood
before the Abbots House, to the Almonry, a small building near by. For
to the Almonry eight years before a wise man had come with a strange new
invention. He hung a red pole at the door for a sign; and soon all the
learned men in the kingdom began to gather at the Almonry of
Westminster, and talk to William Caxton, the printer of books. For he it
was who had come from Bruges in Flanders, bringing with him the first
printing press that had ever been seen in England. And at Westminster he
worked away for fifteen years, translating and printing with ceaseless
industry. It was a hard task that the industrious printer had
undertaken, for the English language was in a state of transition. The
tongue of each shire varied so as to be hardly intelligible to men of
the next county; and Caxton says that the old-English Charters which the
Abbot of Westminster fetched him as models seemed "more like to Dutch
than to English." In his translations he had to choose between two
schools--French affectation, and English pedantry. "Some honest and
great clerks," he says, "have been with me and desired me to write the
most curious terms I could find;" and others blamed him, saying that in
his translations he "had over many curious terms which could not be
understood of common people, and desired me to use old and homely
terms." "Fain would I please every man," the good-tempered printer
exclaims. But, happily for his successors, Caxton's excellent sense
inclined him to good, plain English, "to the common terms that be daily
used"--and he therefore left a far more lasting mark on English
literature than can be gauged by the number and importance of the books
he printed.

[Illustration: MEMORIAL URN IN HENRY THE SEVENTH'S CHAPEL.]

The Almonry soon became a centre for all that was most cultivated in
England. Lord Arundel pressed the