Mr. Caslon was thrice married. His second and third wives were named respectively Longman and Waters, and each had a good fortune. By his first wife he had two sons and a daughter: William, who succeeded him at Chiswell {246} Street; Thomas, who became an eminent bookseller in Stationers’ Hall Court, where he died in 1783, after having in the previous year served the office of Master of the Stationers’ Company; and Mary, who married first Mr. Shewell, one of the original partners in Whitbread’s brewery, and afterwards Mr. Hanbey, an ironmonger of large fortune. A brother of Mr. Caslon, named Samuel, is mentioned by Rowe Mores, and appears to have served at Chiswell Street for a short time as mould maker, leaving there subsequently, on some dispute, to work in the same capacity for Mr. Anderton of Birmingham. Mr. Caslon died, much respected, at Bethnal Green, on Jan. 23rd, 1766, aged 74, and was buried in the Churchyard of St. Luke’s, the parish in which his three foundries were all situated. The monument to his memory, kept in repair by bequest of his daughter, Mrs. Hanbey, is thus briefly inscribed:― W. CASLON, Esq., ob. 23rd Jan., 1766, ætat 74. A life-size portrait of him by Kyte is preserved at Chiswell Street, representing him holding in his hand the famous Specimen Sheet of 1734. William Caslon II issued in the year of his father’s death a Specimen in small quarto, bearing his own name and containing the same founts as those exhibited in the 1764 book.[491] This Specimen, consisting of thirty-eight leaves, was again reprinted in 1770 by Luckombe in his _History of Printing_,[492] of which work it occupies pages 134 to 173. [Illustration: 67. Long Primer Syriac, cut by Caslon II, _circa_ 1768. (From the original matrices.)] About the year 1768 the Chiswell Street foundry was called upon to supply a Syriac fount for the Oxford University Press, and Caslon produced the Long Primer Syriac which occurs in his subsequent specimens. He had previously supplied the University with a Long Primer Hebrew, and the old ledgers of the foundry show that numerous transactions of a similar kind took place during the latter half of last century. In 1770, besides the specimen of Luckombe, another indirect specimen of the Caslon types was issued by a Mr. Cornish, printer, in Blackfriars, in a very {247} small form—32mo—exhibiting a series of Romans, two founts of Black, and three pages of flowers. It was probably on the Specimen of 1766 that Rowe Mores founded his summary of the contents of the Caslon foundry; and it will be interesting to reproduce this list, as it presents a view of the state of the foundry as it then existed, and, at the same time, distinguishes the authors of the several founts with which it was supplied.