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highest dignities. Yet he was constantly summoned from it to act as counsellor or helper in grave public affairs. He earnestly promoted a crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Land, but it fell to pieces owing to the unworthiness of its leaders, and its failure hastened his death.
23. Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, descendant of an eminent old Roman family, was for a long period at the beginning of the sixth century a.d. the chief minister of Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths. Retiring to a monastery in southern Italy, he there, between the ages of seventy and a hundred, wrote many treatises, among them "De Artibus et Disciplinis, Liberalium Litterarum," from which Caxton here quotes.
16.4. Prosper, S., of Aquitaine, a theologian of the fifth century.
14. Discoursing on Psalm liii. ("Deus in nomine tuo") S. Augustine comments on the words "voluntarie sacrificabo tibi," explaining why and how our sacrifice must be voluntary. "If you praise God in order that he may give you some gift, this is no genuine praise of God. If you praise God for the sake of obtaining money, then, if you had already that, money, you would not praise God; this, then, is not to praise God for himself, not to offer sacrifice voluntarily."
16."franchise": deliverance. A good work freely undertaken is the reverse of slave work. S. Augustine, in reference to the manual labour of monks, quotes S. Paul, who speaks of his own manual labour as having been undertaken without any compulsion, physical or moral.
23. "I have submised myself": bent my shoulders to the task. Latin submittere.
17.29. William, Earl of Arundel, a generous patron of Caxton.
THE HISTORY OF JOB
1. "The land of Uz ": the wild region of Trachonitis, lying inland from the Jordan.
18. "Satan": the "adversary," chief of the fallen angels, allowed to tempt man to evil and so to have a hand in human affairs.
25. "idly": without gain."Job serves for lucre," is the implied meaning.
