Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/203

WILLIAM CAXTON 129 wife's decease, a widower, he was received by the Elector of Nassau, the gener- ous Adolphus. The elector created him his counsellor of state and chamberlain, in order to enjoy in an honorable familiarity the conversation of this surpassing genius, who was afterward to hold converse with all times and all places. This shelter afforded to Gutenberg sheds everlasting lustre on Nassau and its prince. We meet in history with instances where a generous hospitality has given happi- ness and immortal fame to the most insignificant potentates and to the smallest of states. Gutenberg continued printing with his own hands, at Nassau, under the eyes of his Maecenas, the elector, during several years of peace and quiet. He died at the age of sixty-eight, leaving his sister no inheritance, but bequeathing to the world the empire of the human mind, discovered and achieved by a workman. " I bequeath," he says in his will, "to my sister all the books which I printed at the monastery of St. Arbogast." The poor inventor's only legacy to his sur- viving relative was the common property of almost all inventors like himself wasted youth, a persecuted life, a name aspersed, toil, watchings, and the oblivion of his contemporaries. WILLIAM CAXTON (1412-1491) WILLIAM CAXTON, to whom England owes the introduction of printing, was born, according to his own statement, in the Weald of Kent. Of the date of his birth nothing is known with certainty, though Oldys places it in 1412. Lewis and Oldys suppose that be- tween his fifteenth and eighteenth years he was put apprentice to one Robert Large, a mercer or merchant of considerable eminence, who was afterward, successively, sheriff and lord mayor of London, and who upon his death, in 1441, remembered Caxton in his will by a leg- acy of 20 marks. Caxton at this time had be- come a freeman of the Company of Mercers. His knowledge of business, however, induced him, either upon his own account or as agent of some merchant, to travel to the Low Coun- tries for a short time. In 1464 we find him joined in a commission with one Robert Whitehill, to continue and confirm a treaty of trade and commerce between Edward IV. and Philip, Duke of Bur- gundy ; or if they find it necessary, to make a new one. They are styled in it am- 9