of the fifteenth century, Greek was taught at Oxford, and men marvelled as they read that “musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy,” a knowledge of which had been before entirely lost in the West.  Thus was perfected what is known as the revival of letters, when classical learning came to enrich and modify the national literatures, if it did temporarily retard the vernacular progress.  The Humanists carried the day against the Obscurantists; and, as scholarship had before consisted in a thorough knowledge of Latin, it now also included a knowledge of Greek, which presented noble works of poetry, eloquence, and philosophy, and gave us a new idiom for the terminologies of science.

INVENTION OF PRINTING.—­Nor was this all.  This great wealth of learning would have still remained a dead letter to the multitude, and, in the main, a useless treasure even to scholars, had it not been for a simple yet marvellous invention of the same period.  In Germany, some obscure mechanics, at Harlem, at Mayence, and at Strasbourg, were at work upon a machine which, if perfected, should at once extend letters a hundred-fold, and by that process revolutionize literature.  The writers before, few as they were, had been almost as numerous as the readers; hereafter the readers were to increase in a geometrical proportion, and each great writer should address millions.  Movable types, first of wood and then of metal, were made, the latter as early as 1441.  Schoeffer, Guttenberg, and Faust brought them to such perfection that books were soon printed and issued in large numbers.  But so slowly did the art travel, partly on account of want of communication, and partly because it was believed to partake of necromancy, and partly, too, from the phlegmatic character of the English people, that thirty years elapsed before it was brought into England.  The art of printing came in response to the demand of an age of progress:  it was needed before; it was called for by the increasing number of readers, and when it came it multiplied that number largely.

WILLIAM CAXTON.—­That it did at last come to England was due to William Caxton, a native of Kent, and by vocation a mercer, who imported costly continental fabrics into England, and with them some of the new books now being printed in Holland.  That he was a man of some eminence is shown by his having been engaged by Edward IV. on a mission to the Duke of Burgundy, with power to negotiate a treaty of commerce; that he was a person of skill and courtesy is evinced by his being retained in the service of Margaret, Duchess of York, when she married Charles, Duke of Burgundy.  While in her train, he studied printing on the Continent, and is said to have printed some books there.  At length, when he was more than sixty years old, he returned to England; and, in 1474, he printed what is supposed to be the first book printed in England, “The Game and Playe of the Chesse.”  Thus it was a century after Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales that printing was introduced into England.  Caxton died in 1491, but his workmen continued to print, and among them Wynken de Worde stands conspicuous.  Among the earlier works printed by Caxton were the Canterbury Tales, the Book of Fame, and the Troilus and Creseide of Chaucer.