characteristics of its own which distinguished it from the LETTRE FLAMAND of the Dutch on the one hand, and the FRACTUR of the Germans on the other. It has occasionally suffered compression in form, and very occasionally expansion; but till 1800 its form was not seriously tampered with. Caslon was praised for his faithful reproduction of the genuine Old English; other founders, like Baskerville, did not even attempt the letter; the old Blacks were looked upon as the most useful and interesting portion of James’s foundry at its sale[103]; and the Roxburgh Club, those Black-letter heroes of the early years of this century, dismissed all the new-fangled founts of modern founders in favour of the most venerable relics of the early English typographers. Of these newfangled Blacks, it will suffice to recall Dibdin’s outburst of righteous indignation—“Why does he (_i.e._, Mr. Whittingham), and many other hardly less distinguished printers, adopt that frightful, gouty, disproportionate, eye-distracting and taste-revolting form of Black-letter, too frequently visible on the frontispieces of his books? It is contrary to all classical precedent, and outrageously repulsive in itself. Let the ghost of Wynkin de Worde haunt him till he abandon it!”[104] [Illustration: 11. Philosophie Flamand, engraved by Fleischman, 1743. (From the matrices in the Enschedé foundry.)] The LETTRE DE SOMME of the Germans, which, as we have seen, was adopted by Schoeffer in 1459, became in the hands of the fifteenth century printers a rival to the Gothic. Whether, as some state, it was derived from the Gothic, or was a distinct hand used by the lay scribes, we need not here discuss. Its name has been generally supposed to owe its origin to the fact that among the earliest works printed in this character was the _Summa fratris S. Thomas de Aquino_.[105] {55} Others derive the name from the carelessly formed letters used in books of account. This letter developed in considerable variety among the early presses of the fifteenth century. Its main characteristics being that of a round Gothic,[106] or at least of a Gothic shorn of its angles, it lent itself readily to the influence of the Roman, and we find it, as in the case of the first Italian books, merging into that character; while in the case of many of the German and Netherlands presses we find it occasionally absorbing that character, adopting its form frequently in the capitals, and “Gothicising” it in the lower-case. But to arrive at an accurate idea of the changes and varieties of the LETTRE DE SOMME, it is necessary to study carefully the productions of the various presses and schools of typography in which it was used. In England it appeared, as might be expected, in some of the early works of the first Oxford press,[107] whither it was brought from Cologne. But it never took root in the country, and was speedily rejected for the national Gothic, only to reappear as an exotic or a curiosity. SECRETARY.