William Martin was brother to Robert Martin,[679] Baskerville’s apprentice and successor. He appears to have acquired his first knowledge of the art at the Birmingham foundry, and about the year 1786 to have come to London and entered into the service of Mr. George Nicol,[680] as a punch cutter. Mr. Nicol was at that time engaged in maturing his plans for the production of a magnificent edition of _Shakespeare_, and kept Martin at his own house “to cut sets of types after approved models in imitation of the sharp and fine letter used by the French and Italian printers.” On the establishment of the famous “Shakespeare Press,”[681] by Messrs. {331} Boydell and Nicol, in 1790, at Cleveland Row, St. James’s, with William Bulmer as presiding genius, Martin was established in premises hard by, in Duke Street; his foundry being a sort of private foundry in connection with the Press. Here it was that he produced the founts in which the magnificent works, issued during the next twenty years from Bulmer’s Press, were printed. The appearance of the first part of the _Shakespeare_[682] in 1791 at once established the fame of the printer and his types; and the completion of the work, in nine volumes, in 1810, may be regarded as marking an epoch in British typography. “No work of equal magnitude”, says the enthusiastic Dibdin, “ever presented such complete accuracy and uniform excellence of execution. There is scarcely one perceptible shade of variation from the first page of the first volume, to the last page of the work, either in the colour of the ink, the hue of the paper, or the clearness and sharpness of the types.”[683] The _Milton_,[684] which followed, is considered a still finer specimen of typography. The enthusiasm animating all concerned in the new undertaking was remarkable, and attracted universal attention. “The nation,” says Dibdin, “appeared to be not less struck than astonished; and our venerable monarch, George III, felt anxious not only to give such a magnificent establishment every degree of royal support, but, infected with the matrix and puncheon mania, he had even contemplated the creation of a royal printing office within the walls of his own palace.” One of the King’s great ambitions was for England to rival Parma in the productions of Bodoni,[685] and Dibdin alludes to a story current at the time of “his majesty being completely and joyfully taken in, by bestowing upon the efforts of Mr. Bulmer’s press that eulogy which he had supposed was due exclusively to Bodoni’s”.[686]