Meanwhile, in the English Midlands an interesting and creditable, though wrong-headed, attempt to improve on existing founts had been made by John Baskerville, a Worcestershire man, born in 1706, who worked at Birmingham, and in 1757 printed there in his own types a quarto edition of _Virgil_ which attracted considerable notice. The merit of Baskerville's type is its distinctness; its fault is the reappearance in a slightly different form of the old heresy of Aldus, that what is good, or is thought to be good, in penmanship must necessarily be good in type. In imitation of the Writing-Masters Baskerville delighted in making his upstrokes very thin and his downstrokes thick, and his serifs--that is, all the little finishing strokes of the letters--sharp and fine. It is probable that his ideals were influenced in this direction by books like Pine's _Horace_ (1733-7), in which, as already noted, the letterpress as well as the illustrations and ornament is engraved throughout. These contrasts of light and heavy lines would naturally please an engraver; but they have no advantage when transferred to type, only making the page appear restless and spotty. Contemporary opinion in England was no more than lukewarm in their favour. The _Virgil_ procured Baskerville a commission from the University of Oxford to cut a Greek fount, but this was generally condemned, though it had the merit of being free from contractions. Editions of Milton's _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_ (1758), and other classics, were more successful, and Baskerville was appointed printer to the University of Cambridge for ten years; but his profits were small, and when he died in 1775, in default of an adequate English offer, his types were sold to a French society for L3700, and used in printing a famous edition of the works of Voltaire (1785-9).