“The mystery thrown over the operations of a Type foundry,” says Mr. Vincent Figgins II in 1855, “within my own recollection (thirty-four years), and the still greater secrecy which had existed in my father’s experience, testifies that the art had been perpetuated by a kind of Druidical or Masonic induction from the first. An anecdote of my father’s early struggles may illustrate this. At the death of Mr. Joseph Jackson, whom my father had served ten years as apprentice and foreman, there was in progress for the University Press of Oxford a new fount of Double Pica Greek, which had progressed under my father’s entire management. The then delegates of that Press—the Rev. Dr. Randolph and the Rev. W. Jackson—suggested that Mr. Figgins should finish the fount himself. This, with other offers of support from those who had previously known him, was the germ of his prosperity (which was always gratefully acknowledged). But when he had undertaken this work, the difficulty presented itself that he did not know where to find the punch-cutter. No one knew his address; but he was supposed to be a tall man, who came in a mysterious way occasionally, whose name no one knew, but he went by the _sobriquet_ of ‘_The Black Man_.’ This old gentleman, a very clever mechanic, lived to be a pensioner on my father’s bounty—gratitude is, perhaps, the better word. I knew him, and could never understand the origin of his _sobriquet_, unless Black was meant for dark, mysterious, from the manner of his coming and going from Mr. Jackson’s foundry.” Shortly after the completion of the Greek fount, Mr. Figgins was called upon {339} to execute a fount of Persian under the direction of the eminent Orientalist, Sir William Ouseley.[704] This type was used in Francis Gladwin’s _Persian Moonshee_[705] in 1801, and other works; and was commended by Dr. Adam Clarke as a beautiful letter in the finest form of the Nustaleek character. About the same time, he cut a fount of English Télegú from a MS., for the East India Company, in whose library, says Hansard, the “matrices or moulds” were afterwards deposited. Of this fount he issued two specimens about 1802, one a folio, the other a quarto; and about the same time put forward a specimen of “Two-line letters” in the same form.