If there be need, the increase in the number of our letters is not refused to us any more than to other people, but the need is denied, because we entered upon other people’s most perfect inventions, and though this came later in time, yet it was so much the surer, because all things necessary were devised to our hands, and because our need can be no new need. Whatever we need to write we are able to write, and when we have written it we are able to read it. If there be any fault, the remedy must be, not to seek what we have not, but to mark what we have, seeing that we have sufficient. The credit of sound being well established in their opinion, as the natural lord and leader of all our letters, and custom being condemned as a traitor, intruding against all right upon the territory of sound, then they turn to the cure of this diseased corruption, and pray Hippocrates to be judge. To amend that which is amiss in the writing of our tongue, their ground-work being laid in the shaken monarchy of deposed sound, they proceed in a full course of general innovation, though some more and some less. First, they increase the number of our letters and diphthongs, as if it were not possible either heretofore to have written, or at this day to write, any word correctly, for want of some increase in the number of our letters. For as the overcharging of our words with too many letters comes by using too much those which we have already, so the difficulty through using them so diversely proceeds from the mere want of material to answer each particular purpose. Then they change the form of our letters and bring us in new faces with very strange lineaments, how well-favoured to behold, I am sure I know, and how unready for a penman to run on with, methinks I foresee,--yet such readiness in the character to follow the hand roundly is a special service belonging to the pen. Nor do I myself in these observations so much regard what the print will stamp well,--for it will express anything well whose form can be imitated,--as what the pen will write well and that with good dispatch, because printing is but a peculiar benefit for the few, while writing is general and in every man’s fingers. A form that is fair to the eye in print and cumbersome to the hand in penning, will not pass in writing. To conclude, this, they say, is the only help to amend all misses: for defect, to enlarge; for what is old and corrupt, to bring in what is new and correct; need enforces redress, and duty requires these changes.