ice books and preachers with sermons, furnishing the clerk with his
"Golden Legend" and knight and baron with "joyous and pleasant histories
of chivalry." But while careful to win his daily bread, he found time to
do much for what of higher literature lay fairly to hand. He printed all
the English poetry of any moment which was then in existence. His
reverence for that "worshipful man, Geoffrey Chaucer," who "ought to be
eternally remembered," is shown not merely by his edition of the
"Canterbury Tales," but by his reprint of them when a purer text of the
poem offered itself. The poems of Lydgate and Gower were added to those of
Chaucer. The Chronicle of Brut and Higden's "Polychronicon" were the only
available works of an historical character then existing in the English
tongue, and Caxton not only printed them but himself continued the latter
up to his own time. A translation of Boethius, a version of the AEneid from
the French, and a tract or two of Cicero, were the stray first-fruits of
the classical press in England.

[Sidenote: Caxton's work]

Busy as was Caxton's printing-press, he was even busier as a translator
than as a printer. More than four thousand of his printed pages are from
works of his own rendering. The need of these translations shows the
popular drift of literature at the time; but, keen as the demand seems to
have been, there is nothing mechanical in the temper with which Caxton
prepared to meet it. A natural, simple-hearted taste and enthusiasm,
especially for the style and forms of language, breaks out in his curious
prefaces. "Having no work in hand," he says in the preface to his AEneid,
"I sitting in my study where as lay many divers pamphlets and books,
happened that to my hand came a little book in French, which late was
translated out of Latin by some noble clerk of France--which book is named
Eneydos, and made in Latin by that noble poet and great clerk Vergyl--in
which book I had great pleasure by reason of the fair and honest termes
and wordes in French which I never saw to-fore-like, none so pleasant nor
so well ordered, which book as me seemed should be much requisite for
noble men to see, as well for the eloquence as the histories; and when I
had advised me to this said book I deliberated and concluded to translate
it into English, and forthwith took a pen and ink and wrote a leaf or
twain." But the work of translation involved a choice of English which
made Caxton's work important