THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION, 27 
fourteen members of the distinguished Elzevir family were printers 
and booksellers ; and during one hundred and thirty consecutive 
years their presses sent forth twelve hundred editions, nine hundred 
and sixty-eight of which were Latin classics or modern authors who 
wrote in Latin. 
But none of the old printers stands in such intimate relation- 
ship to English literature as William Caxton; and to English 
readers his name and books have charms exclusively their own. 
Caxton learned the printing art on the Continent, probably at 
Cologne, soon after the year 1471. Although direct testimony is 
lacking, it is probable that Veldner, Colard Mansion and Caxton 
worked together at Cologne in the same office, but under what 
master-printer is conjectural. Biographies of Caxton have, within a 
few years past, been written by Charles Knight and by Mr. Blades. 
To both the work was a labour of love, and both were printers who 
wrote with the enthusiasm of craftsmen for their art. Charles 
Knight was a pioneer in opening up the treasures of good literature 
to the masses, and was so advanced a printer, publisher and author 
as to be called the Caxton. of the nineteenth century. His Cyclo- 
pedia, issued in penny numbers half a century ago—one of his 
many enterprises to popularize knowledge—cost for literary labour 
alone £40,000. Mr. Blades, in his life of England’s first printer, 
has traced out and studied the productions of Caxton’s press with a 
pious care unsurpassed by that of a Brahman for his texts; and his 
book, as it deserves to be, is already a classic. But Caxton left 
neither letters nor journals, and but scanty materials of any kind 
for a biographer to work upon; and his life is best known by his 
works, and by such glimpses of his contemporaries and his own 
personal experience as are given in the delightful introductions he 
wrote to his books. The date of Caxton’s birth is usually stated 
to be 1412, but Mr. Blades thinks he was not born before 1422. 
His place of birth was in the weald of Kent, and, he says, there he 
studied English, where he doubts not is spoken as rude and broad 
English as in any place in England. He went to school; but 
whether in London or in a country school is not known. In the 
prologue to his Life of Charles the Great, he expresses his gratitude 
to God for the simple cunning according to which his translation 
has been made, adding: ‘‘I am also bounden to pray for my fader 
