the improved manufacture of ink. When made according to his recipe, the ink must have been better than the mixture he condemns, but it would not satisfy the needs of a modern printer. Moxon used three ingredients only

smoke-black, resin, and linseed-oil. Nowhere does he speak of a mill for the grinding or more thorough incorporation of the black with the varnish. The printing-ink used by him, and by all printers for more than a century after him, was nothing more than an imperfect and unscientific trituration of smoke-black and boiled-oil stiffened with resin.

The great fault of eighteenth-century printing-inks was their grayness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century endeavors were made to remove this defect by overloading the varnish with black. This improved the depth of the color, but all the color so added did not adhere to the oil or the paper. When the oil dried much of the black was freed, and set off on the opposite page, or transferred itself to the fingers of the incautious reader.

This fault, more to be dreaded than that of grayness, was one that the elder Whittingham had to overcome. The professional ink-makers gave him little help, and he was obliged to manufacture his own ink. Other printers followed his example, and indirectly compelled the inkmakers for the trade to furnish better inks. The service rendered by these reformers was properly acknowledged by Bensley, in 1842,' when he said that "thirty years ago the good execution of printing at once testified to the skill and industry of the printer- as he could command neither good presses, types nor ink . . . We have 1 Dibdin's "Bibliomania," 8vo, London, 1876, footnote on page 617.

now ink of splendid lustre, at a fourth of the cost of fabrication then; our ink is now to be depended on for standing, it works freely, and can be had at reasonable prices . . . The substitution of the inking roller, instead of the cumbrous and inconvenient old balls, has much eased the labours of the pressman, and facilitated the regularity of colour."