This led me into planning a Cuneiform typewriter. I did not have one built, but my plan was briefly this: I divided the wedges that are upright or slope down from the wedges that are level or slope up, and then picked out the commonest groups of each; and, instead of always moving on from left to right, I had a catch to check the automatic movement of the paper, so that one group could be printed on another with the level wedges running across the uprights. The compound groups are not exactly like the groups in printed books; but very often there is just as great a difference between these printed groups and their originals on the clay or stone. After studying Cuneiform in printed books, people are annoyed at finding that they cannot read a word of the real thing; and there are other kinds of print with that same fault. Hebrew was written in letters that were practically the same as the Phœnician letters from which our English capitals have come: yet it is printed in letters that are not like ours nor like its own. In my Cambridge days the Regius Professor of Hebrew (the late Dr Jarrett) was trying hard to get this changed, and he brought out a Hebrew book in what he called a modified Roman alphabet. I think he might have gone a good deal further, and I do not know that anybody else has gone as far; but, really, something should be done. Hebrew type is just about as bad as any type can be, with half the letters so like others that they may be confused. Greek type is not so bad; but it is quite unlike the Greek of the inscriptions or the older manuscripts. And it expresses nothing that Roman or Italic type would not express as well. If anybody says Iota Subscript, I say iota was not subscript in good Greek, but kept its dressing in the line. We write English in the same style as Italic type, yet print it with the Roman type that represents handwriting of four hundred years ago. If we are going to copy other writing than our own, we might as well adopt the Gothic type that still survives in Germany. Gothic and Italic both look well, but nothing can be uglier than Roman. I consider it clear proof of mania in a bibliomaniac, if he buys books in Roman type for anything but common use. We ought to scrap the ugly thing, and print English (as we write it) in Italic.