The value of the English _Polyglot_ was vastly enhanced by the addition to it of Dr. Edmund Castell’s Heptaglot _Lexicon_,[329] which, after seventeen years of incessant labour, commencing with the first announcement of the Polyglot, was printed, at Roycroft’s press, in 1669, in two volumes, uniform in size and style with the _Bible_, of which henceforth it formed a necessary complement. Respecting this famous work, there is little to add from a typographical point of view to what has already been noted with regard to the _Polyglot_. The {177} same types are, with few exceptions, used in both. Mores considers, but wrongly, that the Amharic shown in Castell’s work is metal, and the same as that used in the _Oratio Dominica_ of 1713. This letter (which also appeared in the first edition of the _Oratio Dominica_ in 1700) belonged to Oxford University, who procured it in 1692, being the Ethiopic character with additions. But the few letters shown in the _Heptaglot_ are evidently engraved by hand, and not cast. It is to be regretted that Castell’s work, which has been pronounced one of the greatest and most perfect works of the kind ever performed by human industry and learning, and which represented an amount of heroic perseverance in the midst of adverse circumstances scarcely credible, was almost the ruin of its author, both in constitution and fortune. It sold slowly, and at the time of his death upwards of 500 copies were left on hand. The encouragement he received both from royal and episcopal patronage was inadequate to cover the losses which the undertaking had involved, and he died in comparative obscurity in 1685. Roycroft’s office appears to have suffered severely by the Fire of London in 1666, and a large number of copies of Castell’s _Lexicon_, then in course of printing, were destroyed. To the same disastrous event may also be attributed the disappearance of some of the founts of the _Polyglot_ founders, after the completion of the _Lexicon_. Mores, however, succeeds in tracing the most interesting of these; and the fact that all the matrices did not go down to posterity as a single property, is additional proof that they were not all the production of one artist. The Arabic, larger Syriac, and Samaritan passed into the foundry of the Grovers, and the Ethiopic into that of Robert Andrews, who, it seems probable, also inherited the Hebrew and Black. The smaller Syriac came into Mr. Caslon’s hands. * * * * *