"Songs of war for gallant knight, Lays of love for lady bright;"
"The Tale of Troy divine," for scholars; "Tullie, of old age," and "of Friendship," and "Virgil's Æneid," for the classical; "Lives of Our Ladie and divers Saints," for the religious; and "The Consolation of Boethius," for the afflicted. But several editions prove the popularity of the Father of English poetry; and we find the "Tales of Cauntyrburrie," and the "Book of Fame," and "Troylus and Cresyde, made by Geoffrey Chaucer," the great and fitting representatives of the native English muse.
We ought to remember, in judging of the paucity of books produced in England, that the Wars of the Roses broke out at the very time when Guttenberg's labours began. In such a season of struggle and unrest as the thirty years of civil strife--for though Mr. Knight, in his very interesting sketch of this date,[D] has shown that the period of actual and open war was very short, the state of uneasiness and expectation must have endured the whole time--there was small encouragement to the peaceful triumphs of art or literature. And, moreover, the pride of station was revolted by the prospect of the spread of information among the classes to whom it had not yet reached. The noble could afford to acknowledge his inferiority in learning and research to the priest or monk, for it was their trade to be wise and learned, and their scholarship was even considered a badge of the lowness of their birth, which had given them the primer and psalter instead of the horse and sword. But those high-hearted cavaliers could ill brook the notion of educated clowns and peasants. And, strange to say, the sentiment was shared and exaggerated by the peasants and clowns themselves. Jack Cade is represented, by an anachronism of date but with perfect truth of character, as profoundly irritated at the invention of printing, and the building of a paper-mill, and the introduction of such heathenish words as nominatives and adverbs: so that the press began its career opposed by the two greatest parties of the State. Yet truth is mighty and will prevail. No nobility in Europe gives such contributions to the general stock of high and healthy thought as the descendants of the men of Towton and Bosworth, and no peasantry values more deeply, or would defend more gallantly, the gifts poured upon it by a free and sympathizing press. Warwick the King-maker, if he had lived just now, would have made speeches in Parliament and had them reported in the _Times_, and Jack Cade would have been sent to the reformatory and taught to read and write.