Ottley’s theory, and renders nugatory his opinion, that Junius’s story of the thief “is one of the best attested accounts that we possess respecting the early history of typography.” The weight which is attached to Mr. Ottley’s deliverances on the subjects upon which he has written, (and particularly in regard to the _Speculum_, to which four chapters of his work are devoted,) makes it necessary to consider with care whatever he advances upon matters wherein he is largely quoted as an authority by those who have not had similar opportunities for examining the documents upon which he bases his conclusions; and as he does not scruple to denounce those as sophists whose arguments run counter to his own, and to triumphantly expose any slips or inconsistencies which he can detect in the writings of those to whom he opposes himself, it will be well to see whether he is himself free from the failings he so ruthlessly exposes in others. On the question of the separable types which were used in the various editions of the _Speculum_, I shall therefore give his argument entire. He first says--“this type appears to have been formed upon the exact model of the genuine black letter, commonly used from an early period in Holland, and which is of almost constant occurrence in old Dutch manuscript Missals, and other books of prayer. It is similar, in the forms and joinings of the letters, and in the contractions used in it, to what we often find in the most highly embellished books of devotion of the fourteenth century ... this broad-faced type, this genuine black-letter, is a characteristic of early Dutch typography. This, indeed, is now so generally acknowledged by Bibliographers, that it is unnecessary to insist upon it further; as every judge of old printing will at once declare, upon looking at the _Speculum_, that the type it is printed with, is Dutch type.” To all which a ready assent may be given. He proceeds as follows:-- “Any person at all conversant with printing, upon first viewing the Speculum, naturally determines that, except the twenty pages of block-printing, so often noticed, in one of the Latin editions, it was printed with _cast metal types_. Upon an attentive examination of a page, however, he discovers small, but yet, sometimes, very evident variations of form in different specimens of the same letter, which it appears difficult to account for: he finds, perhaps, by measurement, that the same word, although spelt exactly in the same manner, does not always occupy the same space; he is induced perhaps, to hesitate as to the correctness of his first judgment, and to suspect that the type was prepared by the painful and tedious operation of cutting each individual character on a separate piece of metal by the hand.