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types. From this time until the end of the century he
and his successors turned out many founts relatively
admirable. But at the end of the eighteenth century
a revolution was made, and the founders entirely
abandoned the traditional forms of their predecessors,
and evolved the tasteless letters with which nearly all
the books published during the first sixty years of
the present century are printed, and which are still
almost universally used for newspapers and for
Government publications. Particularly objection¬
able forms are in everyday use in all continental
countries requiring Roman letter. (The last two sen¬
tences are set in a type of this character.)

“In 1844 the Chiswick Press printed for Messrs.
Longmans ‘The Diary of Lady Willoughby,’ and re¬
vived for this purpose one of Caslon’s founts. This was
an important step in the right direction, and its success
induced Messrs. Miller & Richard of Edinburgh to
engrave a series of ‘old style’ founts, with one of which
this catalogue is .printed. Most other type-founders now
cast similar type, and without doubt if their customers,
the printers, demanded it, they would expend some of
the energy and talent which now goes in cutting Japanese-
American and sham seventeenth-century monstrosities in
endeavouring to produce once more the restrained and
beautiful forms of the early printers, until the day when
the current handwriting may be elegant enough to be
again used as a model for the type-punch engraver.

“Next in importance to the type are the ornaments,
initial letters, and other decorations which can be printed
along with it. These, it is obvious, should always be
designed and engraved so as to harmonise with the printed
page regarded as a whole. Hence, illustrations drawn
only with reference to purely pictorial effects are entirely
out of place in a book, that is, if we desire seriously to
make it beautiful.

EMERY WALKER.”

ЗЗ8

INSCRIPTIONS ON METAL, STONE, WOOD, &C.

As the material naturally modifies the shapes of
the letters cut or formed on its surface, and as the
object bearing the inscription affects their arrange¬
ment, it is essential that the inscription cutter make
himself familiar with various stones, metals, woods,
&c., with the various chisels and gravers which are
properly employed on them, and with fine inscrip¬
tions or examples of good pieces of lettering (see
pp. 352, 201).

A knowledge of penmanship will be found useful,
and the pen may be appealed to to decide questions
of abstract form in regard to letters which have come
from pen forms (e.g. Roman Small-Letters, Italics,
&c.). And in this connection it may be noted again
that the “slanted-pen forms” (pp. 269, 9) are
generally the most practical.

Engraving on Metal.—Letters incised in metal
may most nearly approach pen forms, as the fine
grain of the metal and the comparatively small scale
of the work allow of fine “thin strokes.” The
engraver, however, while following generally the
“thicks” and “thins” of the penman, allows the
metal and the tool and, to a large extent, his own
hand, to decide and characterise the precise forms
and their proportions.

Inscriptions in Stone (see Chap. XVII, Plates I,
II, and XXIV, and pp. 256, 2).—The grain
of stone does not generally allow of very fine thin
strokes, and the “thicks” and “thins” therefore
tend to differ much less than in pen-work. Their
origin, moreover, is much less easily traced to the
tool—i.e. the chisel—and the difference was less in
the early inscriptions (see Plate II) than we are now

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