Page:A dictionary of printers and printing.djvu/576

 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

567

and piaodcal value to those of Fournier, it most be lemembeied that the pursuits of Mr. Moxon were those of seneial science, while Fournier was by birth, education, and profession, a letter- founder. Mozon was the first of Enrlish letter- eutteis who reduced to rule the art which before him had been practised but by roess, and leil to Bucceedin); artists examples that they might follow ; by nice and accurate divisions, he ad- justed the size, situation, and form of the several parts and members of letter, and the proportion which every part bore to the whole. The lett»s most in use in England when Moxon wrote, were

gearl, nonpareil, brevier, long primer, pica, eng- sh, great primer, double pica, two-line englisn, and french canon. These areall the bodiesof letter noticed by Moxon, from which it appears, that in his time printers were not incumbered with so many different founts as they are at present ; for now there are seven sorts of letter more than are noticed in the above list,viz.minioD, bourgeois, small pica, paragon, two-lines pica, two-lines great primer, and two-lines double pica. For, u these seven sorts had then existed, Mr. Moxon would not have failed to have mentioned them, as he does small pica ; concerning which he says, " We have one body more, which is sometimes used in England, that is, a small pica ; but I account it no discretion in a master printer to provide it, because it differs so little irom pica, that unless the workmen be more careful than they sometimes are, it may be mingled with the pica, and so the beauty of both may be spoiled."

Mr. Moxon followed the business of a mathe- matical instrument maker, and resided at the sign of the Atlas, on Ludgate hill, where he suffered materially by the great fire of London. On November 30, 1678, he was elected a fellow of the royal society, and hydrographer to king Charles 11.

The provisions of that absurd and oppressive decree which had restrained the number of master printers to twenty, and, by the same act, the number of the type-tounders to four, like all other enactments which are opposed to the spirit of an age, were found to have been impossible of execution. The demand for knowledge had be- come so general that twenty printers and four founders were quite inadeauate to the supply, whatever might nave been the opinion of Charles II. and his arbitrary court. The supply, there- fore, went ; for Mr. Moxon informs us, that " the number of founders and printers were grown so many, insomuch that, for the more easy manage- ment of typography, the operators had found it necessary to divide it into the several trades of the master-printer, the letter-cutter, the letter- caster, the letter-dresser, the compositor, the cor- rector, the pressman, the ink-maker, besides several other trades which they take into their anistance, as the smith, the joiner, &c." Such a division of labour indicates the natural pro- gress of an art towards perfection, and is indeed in itself a cause of that perfection. Moxon says that letter-cutting was a handy-work at that time, kept so concealed among the artificers of it, that

he could not learn any one had taught it any other. Moxon himself, however, laid down ma- thematical rules for the formation of letters, but his science does not seem to have led him to any improvement in shape, for the characters which he formed are like the ugly Elzevirs.

1686, May. King James II. granted a licence to Obadiah Walker, and his assignees only, for twenty-one years, to print and sell the kioks following, without incurring any penalty, loss, or disability whatsoever ; so that the number of any one of the said books printed in any one year exceed not 20,000.

StKwcuten of tht Ctergfii Chitreh Onenunml; Kucha- rUtt Commuaionbi one kind; BHeharitUn Com/iendiumi jroM«e» to CkrUtian Pletjii Itecauuy Pittfs btfaUMIUf; ObUgatton of JudgmenU ; 5*ar( CoitfeotlonM of FaUki Danger of Sehiimi Conetrning Saered TUnni Cdibacfi Miraelf, Idolatry i Anti-CKrUti Append, to Roman De- votioM! Ben^/UtoftkeHofyOkoriiidam'irM; tAtaniet and Hgtnne; Pielu Romano, et ParMnut*; Butric; ConM. on the Unee of Saintt ; OnU Tradition s InttU. of the 8oc. of Jam ; State of the Dead i tMde in Controver- eiee; Romex DeeotkHu vtndleatedi Roman Doctrine of Bepentanee and Indnlgendea tindleated; Stiltinglleeft PriJtciplet amtider'di Parapkraee on St. Paul't EpUtIa ; Beneflttofour SavUmri htfe of Jeiat Ckrttt \ S. Ter eta's Workei 8. Anttin't life; Greg. Lopeaft Ufe-

Obadiah Walker was at first a divine of tlie church of England, but afterwards joined the Roman catholics. He was himself the author of several' of the above mentioned pieces. In the same place above referred to, will be found king James's licence, dispensation, and pardon, for Obadiah Walker, master of university college, Oxford, and others. The original of this licence is preserved among bishop Tanner's manuscripts in the Bodleian library, Oxford.

1686. William Leybourn, a printer in Lon- don, but of whom there is no account of his birth or death. He published several of the mathe- matical works of Samuel Foster, astronomical professor to Giesham college. He afterwards Decame an eminent author himself, and appears to have been the most universal mathematician of his time. He published many mathematical treatises in the seventeenth century. Among these his Cursux Mathematicru was esteemed the best system of the kind extant. His Panarith- molofia ; or, Trader't Sure Guide, being tables ready cast up, was long in use. It was formed upon a plan of his own, and has been adopted by M. Barenne, in France. The seventh edition was published in 1741.

1686. Pennsylvania* was the second English colony in America (Massachusetts being the first) in which the art of printing was esta- blished. About the year 1686 or 1687, William Bradford, a native of Leicester, in England, set up a press near Philadelphia ; commencing his labours by printing a sheet almanac for the year 1687 : in 1689 he moved into the city, where one of his earliest essays was a quarto pamphlet by George Keith, respecting the New England churches.

• This province «u fbnnded by the joitlr celebrated WUUam I^nn, in the year ItSl. He waa born In London, Oct itu, and died JolrlO, 1718.

VjOOQ IC