press by storm, and brought about that complete abandonment of the Caslon-Elzevir models which marked, and in some cases disfigured, the last years of the eighteenth century. The famous presses of Bensley and Bulmer introduced the modern Roman under the most favourable auspices. The new letter was honest, businesslike, and trim; but in its stiff angles, its rigid geometrical precision, long hair-seriffs, and sharp contrasts of shade, there is little place for the luxuriant elegance of the old style.[93] In France, the new fashion, even with so able an exponent as Didot, had a competitor in the Baskerville type, which, rejected by us, was welcomed by the French _literati_. Nor was this the only instance in which the fashion went from England to France, for in 1818 the Imprimerie Royale itself, in want of a new _typographie_ of the then fashionable Roman, came to London for the punches. The typographical taste of the first quarter of the present century suffered a distinct vulgarisation in the unsightly heavy-faced Roman letters, which were not only offered by the founders, but extensively used by the printers; and the date at which we quit this brief survey is not a glorious one. The simple uniformity of faces which characterised the specimens of Caslon and his disciples had been corrupted by new fancies and fashions, demanded by the printer and conceded by the founder,—fashions which, as Mr. Hansard {49} neatly observed in 1825, “have left the specimen of a British letter-founder a heterogeneous compound, made up of fat-faces and lean-faces, wide-set and close-set, proportioned and disproportioned, all at once crying “Quousque tandem abutêre patientia nostra?” Some of the coarsest of the new fashions were happily short-lived; and it is worth transgressing our limit to record the fact that in 1844 the beautiful old-face of Caslon was, in response to a demand from outside, revived, and has since, in rejuvenated forms, regained both at home and abroad much of its old popularity.