2б Art in the Alphabet.

abrurfgiu

Mmnoçijr?
fstuûnifii

25. GOTHIC MINUSCULE.

circumstances ; we cannot conveniently depart far
from it ; but something may be done. There is
no need to revive mediaeval lettering, no occasion
to invent new lettering all out of our own heads, if
that were possible ; any new departure of ours
must be very much on old lines ; but at least we
might found ourselves upon the best that has been
done, and go straight to that for inspiration.

Type, as before said, was based on manuscript
forms. These manuscript forms had been shaped
with a view always to easy writing. What was
difficult to pen dropped out of use, and lettering
became what the scribe made it. The considera¬
tions, however, which guided the writer no longer
concern the printer. It is time, perhaps, he took
stock of the alphabet—looked over it with a view

Art in the Alphabet. 27

to its perfection, since one shape is about as easy
to print as another. The changes which have
taken place in our printed type during the last
three hundred years or so may very likely have
been on the whole in the direction of easy reading,
but they have not been in the direction of beauty ;
and it is quite likely that it may be worth while
restoring some obsolete forms of letter now that we
have not to write them. There is inconvenience
in departing in any appreciable degree from the
accepted form of letter; but we have arrived to-day
at a period when everyone is so familiar with the
printed page that, prejudiced as we may be against
any modification of it, there is no danger of our
finding any real difficulty in reading an improved
type. Lettering is none the more legible because
it is ugly: beauty is compatible with the very
sternest use.

The earliest writing was most probably scratched
with a point upon whatever came handiest to the
scribe—skins, palm leaves, or the bark of trees, and
especially upon clay, a material which had only to
be burnt to become more lasting than stone.

If, in scratching upon firm clay, the writer begins
his stroke with a dig and then drags out the tool,
it results in a wedge-shaped scratch. That seems
to be the way the cuneiform character came about ;
but the lettering upon the early Babylonian
" bricks," as they are called, is so precisely defined
that it must have been done with a sharp graver-