Page:The History of Ink.djvu/52

46 Now, by way of comment on, we will say that "it is very curious," and moreover very strange, if not ridiculous, that he and , (from whom he copies without a full and fair acknowledgment,) while "deeply complaining of the inferiority of our inks to those of antiquity," have utterly failed to ascertain the cause or even to notice the occasion of it. They, as well as other writers on the subject, observe the excellence of the ink employed in manuscripts of earlier ages, down to the twelfth century, and the inferiority of the ink used from that period down to the close of the seventeenth century, without turning attention to the great historical fact that the in Europe was established in that same twelfth century.

A peculiar (a variety of the disease known to pschyopsycho [sic]-nosologists as the cacoëthes scribendi,) seems to be hereditary in the D'Israeli family. Author:Benjamin Disraeli, (the son of Isaac,) late Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c., when he rose in his place, as the Head or Representative of Her Majesty's government in the House of Commons, to pronounce a eulogy on the recently deceased Duke of Wellington, had the impudence to repeat, word for word, a very bald translation of the elogè delivered by Lamartine a few years previous, on