general use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment. The
scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and
illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists resorting to
Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging
to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot was, therefore,
significant. His new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the
old method of transcription at the very head-quarters of the MS. makers.
The first book that bears his Westminster imprint was the _Dictes and
Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the French by Anthony
Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV. The list of books
printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the time,
since he naturally selected what was most in demand. The list shows that
manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like
the _Order of Chivalry_, _Faits of Arms_, and the _Golden Legend_, which
last Caxton translated himself, as well as _Reynard the Fox_, and a
French version of the _Aeneid_. He also printed, with continuations of
his own, revisions of several early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate. A translation of _Cicero on Friendship_, made
directly from the Latin, by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was
printed by Caxton, but no edition of a classical author in the original.
The new learning of the Renaissance had not, as yet, taken much hold in
England. Upon the whole the productions of Caxton's press were mostly
of a kind that may be described as mediæval, and the most important of
them, if we except his edition of Chaucer, was that "noble and joyous
book," as Caxton called it, _Le Morte Dartur_, written by Sir Thomas
Malory in 1469, and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation
from French Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that
had yet been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes
of simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory's style has
been improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole