He continued indefatigable,

the cares and trammels of life, seeks repose. labouring with the vigour, and more than the perseverance of youth, in an occupation which, at its very commencement, he found painful, as his frame was worne, his hande weary, and his eyes dimmed with looking on white paper.' His last days were eminently characteristic of his life and character, for he employed them in translating from the French a large volume of the Holy Lives of the Fathers Hermits living in the Deserts;' a work full of the solemn stillness of its subject, and calculated, while it weaned his heart from all worldly attachment, to exalt it above the vain solicitude of life.

Wynkyn de Worde, who was Caxton's pupil,* informs us that this work was translated in 1491, and that he finished it the last days of his life. Events often supply proofs that the Almighty permits the spirit to linger in its frail tenement for the accomplishment of some great object. Certainly the body wrestled with the spirit, and the old man accomplished his task, and then calmly and quietly departed. There is no record of his having been married, but his funeral expenses are rated in the Warden's account books of St. Margaret's, Westminster; six shillings and eightpence being charged for four torches, and sixpence for tolling the bell.

Cardinal Wolsey tolled an alarum bell to his memory which sounded beyond England, when he wrote to the Pope, that his Holiness could not be ignorant what divers effects the new invention of printing had produced;' and after complaining of its having occasioned schisms and sects in Germany, he arrives at the conclusion that if men were persuaded once that they would make their own way to God, and the prayers in their own native language might pierce heaven as well as in Latin, how much would the authority of the mass fall? how prejudicial might this prove to all ecclesiastical orders.' But the power of the press once manifested, could not be restrained; the revolutions that have been effected by its influence, whether for good or evil, are registered in history; and it would be

* He was a native of Lorrain, and came into England either along with Caxton, or was afterwards invited by him. He was a man of superior talent and skill, and was employed as Caxton's assistant until his death. He continued in his office as his successor till between the years 1500 and 1502, when he removed his printing office to the sign of the ‘Sun,' in the Parish of St. Bride's, Fleet Street, where he died in 1534, after greatly improving his Art.

difficult for us to imagine the interests, occupations, or business of a world, without books. Caxton, an old man with white hair, and of a simple and steadfast, rather than a brilliant or comprehensive mind, effected more towards illuminating England, than all the mighty powers that preceded him for centuries.

We had curiosity to visit the Almonry in Westminster, to look upon the house traditionally said to have been his residence; we have pictured it (in page 192) as it was previous to its demolition at the end of last year ; but before we describe the house, let us say something of the place.

The Almonry is so termed from the foundation of an almshouse for poor women by Margaret, mother of King Henry VII. The old Chapel of St. Anne also stood here, and the place was called the Eleemosynary or Almonry, because there also the alms of the Abbey were anciently distributed to the poor. The whole of the ground for a considerable distance around this spot was covered by the buildings of the monastery, the Great and Little Sanctuary, and the Gate-house adjoining the Almonry. The Sanctuary was celebrated as a place of refuge for offenders from the earliest period; some writers supposing that it obtained that privilege from Edward the Confessor. A violation of sanctuary perpetrated by Thomas of Woodstock and Sir John Cobham, in the reign of Richard II., who dragged from thence Tresilian, the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and hanged him at Tyburn, was so loudly complained of by the abbot, that the offending parties were obliged publicly to ask the abbot pardon and absolution. In the reign of Henry VI., Eleanor Cobham, wife to Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, fled there; but being charged with witchcraft and high treason, (crimes imputed to her in Shakspeare's delineation of this lady) she was refused harbourage. In the reign of Henry VII., the privileges of the Sanctuary were restricted, and Elizabeth brought it under regulations so that no persons but debtors could avail themselves of it; and such were obliged to take oath that they claimed it not for fraud, but only for safety till they would pay their debts. They were then made to give up all their accounts honestly, and an inventory of all their debts and effects, which if not sufficient to pay, they were to labour to do so by all honest means. They were to attend daily prayers, be obedient to the dean, wear no weapons, or be out of the Sanctuary before

sunrise or after sunset. The Gate-house was a prison for offenders in general. Here Colonel Lovelace, the poet, was confined, as were many of the royalists in the time of Cromwell. The last relic of the building was removed a few years since ; it was a portion of the old wall with an ancient pointed arch; it stood at the entrance to the Dean's Yard, where the way is now to the schools.

mews.

The Little Sanctuary included that portion of ground opposite St. Margaret's Church where now stands the sessions-house, the hospital, and It consisted, as lately as 1806, of a cluster of streets with gabled overhanging old plastered houses, partially decayed, and exhibiting their timber framework in a tottering condition. Upon pulling them down, the original gates leading to the Sanctuary were discovered, which then formed the entrance to a narrow way that received the appellation of Thieving Lane,' so given, probably, because down that lane felons were led to the old Gate-house prison; but the inhabitants may have occasioned the bestowal of the title upon the street they inhabited, for it is recorded as being haunted by the worst of characters, and a harbour for filth and pestilence.

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The Almonry recently was literally worse than it can be represented. Prepared as we were for all that was vile and revolting in its miserable inhabitants, we were not,―could not, be prepared for all we there saw. Tɔ say that it was the St. Giles's of the west end, is saying nothing; its dark and unclean streets were the abodes of infamy. Those who, impelled by a holy wish to save from sin, visited it by day, crept cautiously along, shrinking from the haggard faces or thievish hands, that found refuge there when they could find it nowhere else. The impure district, called by a name so redolent of charity, consisted of a cluster of small streets, buried as it were, between the greater thoroughfares of Westminster; which, however, had no direct communication with them but by narrow alleys and courts still narrower, several of them being mere doorways that formed dark passages in the close and murky streets, whose dim and shattered windows let the cold blast in, and the fumes and voices of maddening and most degrading dissipation out. Ragged and blear-eyed children, serving to show how hideously sin can deform even a child, peered at, and cursed us as we passed. Rushing like a pestilence, from beneath an antique doorway, came a woman intoxicated,

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followed by a still more intoxicated man, brandishing a broom, with which he had not power to strike; some of their neighbours,' in their savage pleasure at the chase, expressed their satisfaction by loud oaths and shouting; and a costermonger, while loading his poor donkey from a cellar with more wood than a horse ought to carry, assured a heap of moving blacknessa sweep, we believe-who was half drowning kittens in a broken crock, taking them out to see if they were dead, and then putting them in again,

Caxton's House.

not heeding that their tailless mother expressed her agony by every means in her power, that he 'd leave the place

next week

no one could stand it.' Having made our way from this open den, we fell to conversing with ourselves as to why our righteous folk did not purify what was, in the very olden time, a district sacred to deeds of love and holiness; and at last we got into Little Dean Street, by which, we afterwards learned, we might have reached Caxton's house without so much annoyance as we had experienced, and which, truth to say, somewhat

damped our antiquarian ardour, for the time; for the day was dark, and the miserable people we encountered, darker still.

Much of this unwholesome district has since our visit been removed; a new street, of great width, is opened through its densest lanes. The squalid inhabitants have passed, we hope, to healthier localities. We now continue to describe the place as it was before the alterations and when the house called Caxton's was standing.

Passing down Little Dean Street, the distance of some dozen houses,

the lane suddenly widened, as if it were aware that, bad as it was, it contained something worth looking at; and so it did, for there stood the remarkable house here engraved :-a timber and plaster erection, of three stories in height, the last story having a wooden balcony resting on the projecting windows below, with doors leading on to it ;-which has been traditionally I called the house of William Caxton. Its antiquity cannot be safely ascribed to so early a date as the period when our printer lived, but it may have stood upon the site, or have been altered from the original structure.

The Roxburghe Club did themselves much honour when they erected a monument to this hero of letters, in the church where he lies buried,St. Margaret's, Westminster.

But England has not yet discharged its duty to its great citizen-its mighty benefactor: surely it is high time that a monument worthy of his fame, and of his country, should perpetuate the memory of one to whom England owes so large a debt of gratitude.