which he printed Ogilby’s _Virgil_,[90] and other works. Yet Roycroft’s handsomest letter—that in which he printed the Royal Dedication to the _Polyglot_ of 1657—was the fount used nearly a century before by Day,[91] whose productions few English printers of the seventeenth century could equal, and none, certainly, could excel. Of Moxon’s attempt in 1683 to regenerate the Roman letter in England, we shall have occasion to speak elsewhere. His theories, as put into practice by himself, were eminently unsuccessful; and though the sign-boards of the day may have profited by his rules, it is doubtful if typography did. His enthusiastic praise of the Dutch letter of Van Dijk may have stimulated the trade between England and Holland; but at home his precepts fell flat for lack of an artist to carry them out. That artist was forthcoming in William Caslon in 1720, and from the time he cut his first fount of pica, the Roman letter in England entered on a career of honour. Caslon went back to the Elzevirs for his models, and throwing into his labour the genius of an enlightened artistic taste, he reproduced their letters with a precision and uniformity hitherto unknown among us, preserving at the same time that freedom and grace of form which had made them of all others the most beautiful types in Europe. Caslon’s Roman became the fashion, and English typography was loyal to it for nearly 80 years. Baskerville’s exquisite letters were, as he himself acknowledged, inspired by those of Caslon. They were sharper and more delicate in outline, and when finely printed, as they always were, were more attractive to the eye.[92] But what they gained in brilliance they missed in sterling dignity; they dazzled the eye and fatigued it, and the fashion of the {48} national taste was not seriously diverted. Still less was it diverted by the experiments of a “nouvelle typographie,” which Luce, Fournier, and others were trying to introduce into France. The stiff, narrow, cramped Roman which these artists produced scarcely finds a place in any English work of the eighteenth century. The Dutch type was now no longer looked at. Wilson, whose letter adorned the works of the Foulis press, and Jackson, whose exquisite founts helped to make the fame of Bensley, as those of his successor Figgins helped to continue it, all adhered to the Caslon models. And all these artists, with Cottrell, Fry, and others, contributed to a scarcely less important reform in English letter-founding, namely, the production by each founder of his own uniform series of Roman sizes,—a feature wofully absent in the odd collections of the old founders before 1720. Towards the close of the century the Roman underwent a violent revolution. The few founders who had begun about 1760 in avowed imitation of Baskerville, had found it in their interest before 1780 to revert to the models of Caslon; and scarcely had they done so, when about 1790 the genius of Didot of Paris and Bodoni of Parma took the English