_JOHN BASKERVILLE_ [Illustration: _From a picture after Miller in the National Portrait Gallery, London._ _Emery Walker Ph. x._ _John Baskerville_] _JOHN BASKERVILLE_ TYPE-FOUNDER AND PRINTER 1706-1775 [Illustration] BY _Josiah Henry Benton, LL.D._ [Illustration] BOSTON _PRIVATELY PRINTED_ 1914 _Copyright, 1914, by J. H. Benton_ _D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston_ _NOTE_ _I have, for some years, been interested in John Baskerville, and have collected his imprints. Knowing this fact, the President of the Boston Society of Printers asked me to prepare a paper on Baskerville, to be read at a meeting of the Society on February 24, 1914. This I did, and that paper formed the basis of this little book._ J. H. B. JOHN BASKERVILLE John Baskerville, a great English type-founder and printer, was born in January, 1706, and died in January, 1775, having lived nearly the full period of threescore years and ten. To understand him and what he did, we must know something of the time and place in which he lived. It was a time when the great middle classes of England were coming into power. The divine right of kings was destroyed at Culloden in 1745. England was slowly awakening from the deadly languor of the corruption of Walpole’s government. Whitefield was preaching, and Wesley was preaching and organizing. The middle classes grew stronger every day and kept Pitt, with his intense patriotism and extravagance, in power, in spite of the upper classes. The rule of England in the East began in 1757, when Clive, on June 23, fought the battle of Plassey. Frederick the Great, aided by the liberal subsidies of Pitt, fought the battle of Rossbach in November, 1757, and the battle of Minden in November, 1759, thus laying the foundation of the German Empire which has always been at peace with England. The capture of Montreal in 1760 established the English ascendancy in the New World. During this period the English Empire came into being because of the rule of the commercial middle class.