Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/41

Rh this. England has not produced such another hero of typography. Considering his brave and unwavering patience, and his life-long, self-sacrificing efforts in raising the art to its highest perfection, he well deserves an appellation too exclusively monopolized by military careers. Not ten in ten thousand of educated men, who read and admire the most beautifully-printed books of the present day have the slightest idea how much the art that so delights them is indebted to the genius and indomitable and ill-requited perseverance of John Baskerville. But the public debt to him was better known and appreciated by illustrious contemporaries in different countries; and by none more fully and admiringly than by an American printer named Benjamin Franklin. He was born at Wolverley, in Worcestershire, in 1706, the same year in which Franklin was born in Boston. Massachusetts; and up to a certain stage in their experience it ran somewhat in the same pathway of life and labour. Young John was apprenticed to a stonecutter, and young Benjamin began his useful life by cutting candle-wicks for his father, a soap-boiler and tallow-chandler. Neither followed his original occupation long. John seems to have acquired great taste and skill for caligraphy while a stonecutter's apprentice. Doubtless he was employed on monumental literature written with his chisel on grave-stones, which