Nichols himself adds, after deploring the comparative failure of Baskerville, to receive appreciation in his native land: “We must admire, if we do not imitate the taste and economy of the French nation, who, brought by the British arms in 1762 to the verge of ruin, rising above distress, were able, in seventeen years, to purchase Baskerville's elegant types, refused by his own country, and to expend an hundred thousand pounds in poisoning the principles of mankind by printing the Works of Voltaire.”

This great work, for the express purpose of printing which Baskerville's types were procured, was thus announced to the English public in 17821:

“A complete edition of the Works of Voltaire, printed by subscription, with the types of Baskerville.

“This work, the most extensive and magnificent that ever was printed, is now in the press at Fort Kehl, near Strasburgh, a free place, subject to no restraint or imprimatur, and will be published towards the close of the present year. It will never be on sale. Subscribers only can have copies. Each set is to be numbered, and a particular number appropriated to each subscriber at the time of subscribing. As the sets to be worked off are limited to a fixed and small number, considering the great demand of all Europe, those who wish to be possessed of so valuable a work must be early in their application, lest they be shut out by the subscriptions being previously filled. Voltaire's Manuscripts and Port-Folios, besides his Works already published, cost 12,000 guineas. This and other expenses attending the publication, will lay the Editors under an advance of £100,000 sterling. The public may from thence form a judgment of the extraordinary care that will be taken to make this edition a lasting

monument of typographical elegance and grandeur," etc. June 4, 1782. The “proposals” were accompanied by two pages of specimens of the type.

Of this famous edition of Voltaire an interesting account is given in Lomenie's Beaumarchais et ses Temps.2 The Society in whose name Beaumarchais undertook the work consisted of himself alone. Besides the Voltaire MSS. and the Baskerville types, he bought and set to work three paper-mills in the Vosges, and after much difficulty secured the old fort at Kehl as a neutral ground on which to establish in security his vast typographical undertaking. The enterprise was one involving labour, time and cost vastly beyond his expectations, and his correspondence with his manager at Kehl presents an almost pathetic picture of his efforts to grapple with the difficulties that beset his task. “How can we promise,” he wrote in 1780, "in the early months of

1 Proposals for Printing by Subscription a Complete Edition of the Works of Voltaire, printed with the Types of Baskerville for the Literary and Typographical Society, 1782, 12 pp. 8vo, with 2 pp. specimens of the type. The French proposal appears to have been put forward in 1780.

2 Beaumarchais and His Times. Translated by H. S. Eduards. London, 1856. 4 vols. 8vo (iii, chap. 24).

1782 an edition which has neither hearth nor home in March 1780? The papermills have to be made, the type to be founded, the printing press to be put up, and the establishment to be formed.” And on another occasion he writes :

Here am I, obliged to learn my letters at paper-making, printing and bookselling.”

It was not until 1784 that Volume One appeared ; and the whole work in two editions was not completed till 1790,1 by which time France was in the throes of the Revolution, and little likely to heed the literary exploits even of one of her most talented sons. Of the 15,000 copies printed, only 2,000 found subscribers ; and after the dissolution of the establishment at Kehl? (where, besides, he printed an edition of Rousseau and a few other works) all the benefit Beaumarchais received from his enterprise was a mountain of waste-paper.

The final destination of Baskerville's types is shrouded in mystery. Most writers assert that the printing establishment at Kehl was entirely destroyed at the commencement of the French Revolution, and many suggest that the types performed their last service in the shape of bullets. Plausible as this story is, it is disproved by the existence of four works of Alfieri, all bearing the imprint, dalla Tipografia di Kehl, co' caratteri di Baskerville, and dated severally 1786, 1795, 1800 and 1809.3 These works, to whose existence no writer on Baskerville appears hitherto to have called attention, bear the strongest internal evidence of the accuracy of their claims, and thus enable us to trace the survival of these famous types to a date twenty years later than that at which they are commonly supposed to have perished. In England, some of Baskerville's types are said to have been in use in the office of Messrs. Harris, in Liverpool, in 1820; and seven years later, we find a work printed by Thomas White, of Crane Court, London, for Pickering, claiming to be “with the types of John Baskerville”.4 But though a fount or two of the types may have survived, all search as to the ultimate fate of the punches or matrices is baffled. They may still exist,

neglected, in the dusty drawers of some foreign press or fonndry. If so, it is to be hoped that their discovery may in due time reward the patience of those whose ambition it is to recover for their native land these precious relics of the most brilliant of all the English letter-founders.

LIST OF BASKERVILLE'S SPECIMENS. No date. A Specimen by John Baskerville, of Birmingham, in the county of Warwick, Letter Founder and Printer. 4to sheet. (1752 ?)

(S. T.) No date. A Specimen by John Baskerville of Birmingham. 4to sheet. (1757 ?) (Althorp.)

No date. A Specimen by John Baskerville of Birmingham, Letter Founder and Printer. (1758 ?). Broadside.

(S. T.) No date. A Specimen by John Baskerville of Birmingham. (1762?). Folio. (S. T.)

1 A statement that they were acquired at the beginning of the century for the printing offices of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. appears, after careful inquiry, to rest on no further foundation than rumour.

He was

HOMAS COTTRELL, described by Mores as à primo

proximus of modern letter-founders, served his appren-
ticeship in the foundry of the first Caslon.
employed there as a dresser, and the portrait of him
which is to be seen in the Universal Magazine of
1750," among a group of Caslon's workmen, represents
him as engaged in that branch of the business.

It is not improbable that he joined with his friend and fellow apprentice, Joseph Jackson, in clandestinely observing the operation of punch-cutting, secretly practised by his master and his master's son at Chiswell Street; and being assisted by natural ability, and what Moxon terms a "genuine inclination," he contrived during his apprenticeship to qualify himself not only in this, but in all the departments of the art.

apprentice of Voskens of Amsterdam, established his foundry in Nevil's Court, Fetter Lane. His first fount was an English Roman, which, though it will compare neither with the performance of his late master, nor with the then new faces of Baskerville, was yet a production of considerable merit for a self-trained hand.

In 1758 an incidental record of Cottrell's Foundry exists in the history, elsewhere recorded, of Miss Elstob's Saxon types, the punches and matrices of which, after remaining untouched for several years at Mr. Caslon's, were brought to Cottrell by Mr. Bowyer, to be “fitted up” ready for use. This task Cottrell performed punctually and apparently to the satisfaction of his employer, returning them with a small fount of the letter cast in his own mould, as a specimen of the improvement made in them.

In 1759 Jackson quitted the business to go to sea, and Cottrell, left to himself, busily proceeded with the completion of his series of Romans, which he carried as low as Brevier, a size "which,” says Rowe Mores," he thinks low enough to spoil the eyes."2

He also cut a Two-line English Engrossing in imitation of the Law-Hand, and several designs of flowers.

The Engrossing, or as Mores styles it, the Base Secretary, was a character designed to take the place of the lately abolished Court Hand in legal documents, and appears to have been designed for Cottrell by a law printer named Richardson. On the completion of the fount, an impression of which we

And be if further heriby cualfid,
That the Mayors Bailiff

, and
héad Offitèrs of Entry Tovou and

SOMAS COZERRELL

73. Engrossing, cut by Cottrell, circa 1763. (From the original matrices.)

here give, Richardson issued a specimen of it, claiming the design, and representing its advantages as the proper character for leases, agreements,

1 See ante, p. 158.

2 Dissertation, p. 82. 8 A Specimen of a New Printing Type, in Imitation of the Law-Hand. Designed by William Richardson, of Castle Yard, Holborn. London. n. d. Broadside.

PP