The entertaining letters of Thomas James from Holland, in 1710,[187] point to a curious practice in that country, which we believe has never obtained in this. We refer to the habit of lending casters and matrices by one founder to another. In each of the two foundries he visited there were places for four casters; but in one case only one man was at work, and in the other no one was to be found, for this reason. This system of interchange is hardly consistent with the jealousy and suspicion shown by the same Dutch founders towards their English rival in his endeavours to procure sets of matrices from their punches. In this endeavour, however, he succeeded, much to his own satisfaction. He also purchased moulds, which, like all the other Dutch moulds he saw, were made of brass. Voskens’ foundry, which he visited, appears to have been “a great business, having five or six men constantly at the furnace, besides boys to rub, and himself and a brother {114} to do the other work.” He also found artists who, like Cupi and Rolij, were punch-cutters only, not attached to any one foundry, but doing work for founders generally. Van Dijk was a cutter only, who kept a founder of his own named Bus, and this founder cast, not at his own or Van Dijk’s house, but at the house of Athias, by whom probably he was also engaged. The Voskens, who succeeded Van Dijk, did their own casting, but their punches and matrices were supplied them by Rolij, who, as an independent artist, was free to sell duplicate matrices of his letters to James. This division of letter-founding into one or more trades, though common abroad, was never a common practice in England, where jealousy and lack of enterprise conspired to keep each founder’s business a mystery known only to himself.[188] In the course of this book we shall have constant occasion to point out the intimate relations which existed at the beginning of the eighteenth century between English printers and Dutch founders. There was probably more Dutch type in England between 1700 and 1720 than there was English. The Dutch artists appeared for the time to have the secret of the true shape of the Roman letter; their punches were more carefully finished, their matrices better justified, and their types of better metal, and better dressed, than any of which our country could boast. Nor was it till Caslon developed a native genius that English typography ceased to be more than half Dutch.