In private life he was a humorist; idle in the extreme; but his invention was of the true Birmingham model, active.  He could well design, but procured others to execute; wherever he found merit he caressed it:  he was remarkably polite to the stranger; fond of show:  a figure rather of the smaller size, and delighted to adorn that figure with gold lace.—­Although constructed with the light timbers of a frigate, his movement was solemn as a ship of the line.

During the twenty-five years I knew him, though in the decline of life, he retained the singular traces of a handsome man.  If he exhibited a peevish temper, we may consider good-nature and intense thinking are not always found together.

Taste accompanied him through the different walks of agriculture, architecture, and the finer arts.  Whatever passed through his fingers, bore the lively marks of John Baskerville.

His aversion to christianity would not suffer him to lie among christians; he therefore erected a mausoleum in his own grounds for his remains, and died without issue, in 1775, at the age of 69.—­Many efforts were used after his death, to dispose of the types; but, to the lading discredit of the British nation, no purchaser could be found in the whole commonwealth of letters.  The universities coldly rejected the offer.  The London booksellers understood no science like that of profit.  The valuable property, therefore, lay a dead weight, till purchased by a literary society at Paris, in 1779, for 3700_l_.

It is an old remark, that no country abounds with genius so much as this island; and it is a remark nearly as old, that genius is no where so little rewarded; how else came Dryden, Goldsmith, and Chatterton to want bread?  Is merit, like a flower of the field, too common to attract notice? or is the use of money beneath the care of exalted talents?

Invention seldom pays the inventor.  If you ask, what fortune Baskerville ought to have been rewarded with?  “The most which can be comprised in five figures.”  If you farther ask, what he possessed?  “The least;” but none of it squeezed from the press.  What will the shade of this great man think, if capable of thinking, that he has spent a fortune of opulence, and a life of genius, in carrying to perfection the greatest of all human inventions; and his productions, slighted by his country, were hawked over Europe, in quest of a bidder?

We must revere, 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 17 years, to purchase Baskerville’s elegant types, refused by his own country, and expend an hundred thousand pounds in printing the works of Voltaire!

BRASS FOUNDRY.