It is not easy to fix the period at which the Roman and Italic became united and interdependent. Very few English works occur printed wholly in Italic, and there seems little doubt that before the close of the sixteenth century the founders cast Roman and Italic together as one fount. The Italic has undergone fewer marked changes than the Roman. Indeed, in many of the early foundries, and till a later date, one face of Italic served for two or more Romans of the same body. We find the same Italic side by side with a broad-faced Roman in one book, and a lean-faced in another. Frequently the same face is made to serve not only for its correct body, but for the bodies next above or below it, so that we may find an Italic of the Brevier face cast respectively on Brevier, Bourgeois, and Minion bodies. These irregularities were the more noticeable from the constant admixture in seventeenth and eighteenth century books of Roman and Italic in the same lines; the latter being commonly used for all proper names, as well as for emphatic words. The chief variations in form have been in the capital letters, and the long-tailed letters of the lower-case. The tendency to flourish these gradually diminished on the cessation of the Dutch influence, and led the way to the formal, tidy Italics of Caslon and the founders of the eighteenth century, some of whom, however, consoled themselves for their loss of liberty in regard to most of their letters, by more or less extravagance in the tail of the Q which commenced the Quousque tandem of their specimens. As in the case of the Roman, Caslon cut a uniform series of Italics, having due relation, in the case of each body, to the size and proportions of the corresponding Roman. The extensive, and sometimes indiscriminate, use of Italic gradually corrected itself during the eighteenth century; and on the abandonment, both in Roman and Italic, of the long ſ and its combinations,99 English books were left less disfigured than they used to be. {53}