Character demonstrates itself in trifles. Washington wrote with clearness and deliberation, like a law-maker; Rufus Choate, intricately and whimsically, like a wit. Oldys runs down the list of English royal autographs, drawing no inferences, and set solely on his fact. Cromwell's signature is paradoxically faint and vacillating. "Elizabeth writ an upright hand,--a large, tall character; James I., in an ungainly fashion, all awry; Charles I., an Italian hand, the most correct of any prince we ever had; Charles II., a little, fair, running, uneasy hand," such, adds a commentator, as we might expect from that illustrious vagabond, who had much to write, often in odd situations, and never could get rid of his natural restlessness and vivacity. It goes somewhat hard with us that Porson, Young, and especially Thackeray, wielded a proper quill, and were prone to consider penmanship as one of the fine arts. Nevertheless, we take it that Mr. Joseph Surface, in the comedy, would write so as to gladden the "herte's roote" of a school-mistress; as, likewise, might our honest friend Iago. Item, that Homer's mark was but a hen-scratch, outdone, in his own day, by the most time-out-of-mind stroller that sang, eyeless, with him.
No missionary, fretting over the innocent rascalities of Afric tribes, burns with holier wrath than seizes us on beholding the prospectus of the "Penman's Gazette." Hark to its beguiling philippics: "Good penmanship hath made fortunes; every year thousands are advanced by it to position and liberal salaries; students make it a specialty. It is worth more than all the Greek and Latin, the _antiquated rubbish_ of the higher schools and colleges, for, ('thine exquisite reason, dear knight?')--for it yields prompt and generous returns in money, food, clothing, good associations, and incentives to usefulness in the world!" The gentle reader is to imagine MONEY in huge capitals, and the other rewards of merit dwindling successively, till the incentives to usefulness are scarce visible to the naked eye. And then, forsooth, one is encouraged periodically by the fish-like portraits of Famous Penmen! Have a care, have a care, little guileless abecedarian, lest thy physiognomy, some black morning, should lend its beauty to the procession of fiends who Write Like Angels!