That these strictures were not wholly the result of prejudice and jealousy, a careful examination of Baskerville’s printed works in the light of the modern {280} canons of fine printing will prove. Even his warmest admirers, like Fournier,[568] tempered their praise with some reservation; while hostile critics, like Mores, summarily denied him a place among letter-cutters at all.[569] Of the prejudice rife against Baskerville at this time, an amusing anecdote is preserved in a letter of Benjamin Franklin to our printer, dated 1760:― “CRAVEN STREET, LONDON, 1760. “DEAR SIR,—Let me give you a pleasant instance of the prejudice some have entertained against your work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a gentleman concerning the artists of Birmingham, he said you would be a means of blinding all the readers of the nation, for the strokes of your letters being too thin and narrow, hurt the eye, and he could never read a line of them without pain. ‘I thought,’ said I, ‘you were going to complain of the gloss of the paper some object to.’ ‘No, no,’ said he, ‘I have heard that mentioned, but it is not that; it is in the form and cut of the letters themselves, they have not that height and thickness of the stroke which makes the common printing so much more comfortable to the eye.’ You see this gentleman was a _connoisseur_. In vain I endeavoured to support your character against the charge; he knew what he felt, and could see the reason of it, and several other gentlemen among his friends had made the same observation, etc. Yesterday he called to visit me, when, mischievously bent to try his judgement, I stepped into my closet, tore off the top of Mr. Caslon’s specimen, and produced it to him as yours, brought with me from Birmingham, saying, I had been examining it, since he spoke to me, and could not for my life perceive the disproportion he mentioned, desiring him to point it out to me. He readily undertook it, and went over the several founts, showing me everywhere what he thought instances of that disproportion; and declared, that he could not then read the specimen, without feeling very strongly the pain he had mentioned to me. I spared him that time the confusion of being told, that these were the types he had been reading all his life, with so much ease to his eyes; the types his adored Newton is printed with, on which he has pored not a little; nay, the very types his own book is printed with (for he is himself an author), and yet never discovered this painful disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours. “I am, etc., “B. FRANKLIN.”[570]