case of the Roman, Caslon cut a uniform series of Italics, having due relation, in the case of each body, to the size and proportions of the corresponding Roman. The extensive, and sometimes indiscriminate, use of Italic gradually corrected itself during the eighteenth century; and on the abandonment, both in Roman and Italic, of the long ſ and its combinations,[99] English books were left less disfigured than they used to be. {53} BLACK LETTER. [Illustration: 10. Gothic type, or “Lettre de Forme,” said to have been engraved _circa_ 1480. (From the original matrices in the Enschedé foundry.)] The Gothic letter employed by the inventors of printing for the _Bible_, _Psalter_, and other sacred works, was an imitation of the formal hand of the German scribes, chiefly monastic, who supplied the clergy of the day with their books of devotion. This letter, as a typographical character, took the name of LETTRE DE FORME, as distinguished from the rounder and less regular manuscript-hand of the Germans of the fifteenth century, which was adopted by Schoeffer in the _Rationale_, the _Catholicon_, and other works, and which became known as LETTRE DE SOMME. The pointed Gothic, or LETTRE DE FORME, a name[100] generally supposed to have reference to the precision in the figure of the old ecclesiastical character (although some authorities have considered it to be a corrupt, rather than a standard form of handwriting), preserved its character with but little variation in all the countries to which it travelled. It is scarcely necessary to detail its first appearance at the various great centres of European typography, except to notice that in Italy and France it came later than the Roman.[101] In England it appears first in Caxton’s type No. 3,[102] and figures largely in nearly all the presses of our early printers. De Worde was, in all probability, the first to cut punches of it in this country, and to produce the letter which henceforth took the name of “English,” as being the national character of our early typography. De Worde’s English, or as it was subsequently styled, Black-letter, was for two centuries and a half looked upon as the model for all his successors in the art; indeed, to this day, a Black-letter {54} is held to be excellent, as it resembles most closely the character used by our earliest printers. The Black being employed in England to a late date, not only for Bibles, but for law books and royal proclamations and Acts of Parliament, has never wholly fallen into disuse among us. The most beautiful typography of which we as a nation can boast during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is to be found in the Black-letter impressions of our printers. The Old English was classed with the Roman and Italic by Moxon as one of the three orders of printing-letter; and in this particular our obligations to the Dutch are much less apparent than in any other branch of the printing art. Indeed, the English Black assumed