deliberate character in their hand-writing, which is often not impaired until extreme age.

The nation, profession, and other accidental properties of a person, may also, perhaps, be discovered in a majority of instances, from his chirograph. But it is obvious that there is no mystery in this, which philosophy need be invoked to elucidate. Mr. Owen's doctrine of circumstances will explain it very satisfactorily. I am only disposed to deny that the bent of natural inclination, or the predominance or deficiency of any intellectual quality, can be ascertained by this test. I have never met with any one who possessed the art of divination in this way; nor, as the theory cannot be proved by any process of reasoning from first principles, can it be supported by a fair examination of any miscellaneous collection of autographs. Imagination may carry us a great way, and suggest resemblances of its own creation, between the characters of men known in history and fac-similes of their autographs. But, divesting ourselves of its influence, let us look at the signatures to the death-warrant of Charles I., or the Declaration of American Independence; which instruments I do not bring into juxtaposition irreverently, but because every one has seen them. I believe it will be impossible, without the aid of fancy, from recorded facts in the lives of those who subscribed these documents, compared with the peculiarities of their signs manual, to found an honest induction in support of this hypothesis.

Some conceited people try to write as badly as they can, because they have heard and believe that it is a proof of genius. While all will admit that this notion is very absurd, it is still generally believed that men of genius do write in a very obscure, infirm, or eccentric character: and we are told of a thousand familiar instances; such as Byron, and Chalmers, and Jeffrey, and Bonaparte, etc. A goodly assortment in the same lot! One thing is very certain, that those who write a great deal for the press, will soon write very badly; without its being necessary to ascribe that circumstance to intellectual organization. Bonaparte had no time, when dictating to six clerks at once, or signing treaties on horseback, to cultivate a clear running hand. Distinguished as he was above other men, in his fame and in his fortunes, I believe we may also concede to him the honor of having written the worst possible hand, decipherable by human ingenuity. And when we find, from the fac-similes of some of his early despatches, how abominably he spelled, as well as wrote, we are led to infer that a defective education, and an eagle-eyed ambition, which soon began to gaze too steadily at the sun to regard the motes in the atmosphere, will sufficiently account for a matter of such small importance to so great a man, without resorting to 'metaphysical aid' to account for his bad writing.

The hand-writing of an individual is not as much connected with the machinery of his mind, as is the effect of any other personal habit. Neat people do not always write neatly; and some very slovenly persons, whom I have known, were distinguished for a remarkably elegant formation of their letters. Affectation, on the contrary, being out of nature, will always betray itself in this parti cular, as in every other.

I am disposed also to treat, as a fond chimera, a notion I have

often heard expressed, that there is a natural gentility appertaining to the chirographs of nature's aristocracy; supposing such a phrase to be proper. Every thing else about a gentleman's letter will furnish better hints as to his breeding and quality, than the character of his hand-writing. Set a well-taught boot-black and a gentleman down to copy the same sentence on pieces of paper of like shape and texture, and few of your conjurers in autographs will be able to guess, from the specimens, which is the gentleman and which is the boot-black.

But to leave this drouthy and prosing disquisition, I am minded to illustrate both the evils and the advantages of bad or illegible writing, by incidents which have occurred, or are easily supposable, in real life. My poor old master, against whose memory I cherish no malice, notwithstanding his frequent fustigation of my youthful knuckles, when he despaired of my profiting either by the unction of his precepts, or the sore application of his ruler, endeavored to frighten me into amendment by examples. He composed for my use a digested chronicle of casualities which had befallen those who perpetrated unseemly scrawls; and, after the manner of Swift, entitled his tract, God's revenge against Cacography.' I have long since lost the precious gift; but I have not forgotten all the legends it contained.

The tale is old, of the English gentleman, who had procured for his friend a situation in the service of the East India Company, and was put to unprofitable expense by misreading an epistle, in which the latter endeavored to express his gratitude. 'Having,' said the absentee, 'been thus placed in a post, where I am sure of a regular salary, and have it in my power, while I enjoy health, to lay up something every year to provide for the future, I am not unmindful of my benefactor, and mean soon to send you an equivalent. Such a rascally hand did this grateful Indian write, that the gentleman thought he meant soon to send him an elephant. He erected a large out-house for the unwieldy pet; but never got any thing to put in it, except a little pot of sweetmeats, and an additional bundle of compliments.

Few who read the newspapers, have not seen an anecdote of an amateur of queer animals, who sent an order to Africa for two monkeys. The word two, as he wrote it, so much resembled the figures one hundred, that his literal and single-minded agent was somewhat perplexed in executing this commission, which compelled him to make war on the whole nation. And great was the naturalist's surprise and perplexity, when he received a letter informing him, in mercantile phraseology, that eighty monkeys had been shipped, as per copy of the bill of lading enclosed, and that his correspondent hoped to be able to execute the rest of the order in time for the next vessel!

Many, too, must have read a story which appeared in the English newspapers, a few years since, of the distressful predicament into which a poor fisherman's wife was thrown, by the receipt of a letter from her husband, who had been absent from home, with several of his brethren, beyond the ordinary time. The honest man stated, in piscatorial phrase, the causes of his detention, and what luck he had met with in his fishing. But the conclusion of his bulletin, as spelled

by his loving amphibious helpmate, was as follows: I AM NO MORE!'" The poor woman gazed a while on this fatal official intelligence of her husband's demise, and then on her eleven now fatherless infants; and then she burst into a paroxysm of clamorous sorrow, which drew around her the consorts of seventeen other fishermen, who had departed in company with the deceased man. None of them could read; but they caught from the widow's broken lamentations the contents of the supernatural postscript; and taking it for granted that they had all been served in the same manner by the treacherous element, they all lifted up their voices, and the corners of their aprons, and made an ululation worthy of so many forsaken mermaids. In the words of the poet, they made ''igh water in the sea,' on whose margin they stood; when one of the overseers of the poor, who came to the spot, alarmed by the rumor that the parish was like to be burthened with eighteen new widows and an hundred and odd parcel orphans, snatched the letter from the weeping Thetis, and silenced the grief of the company, by making out its conclusion correctly, which was, 'I add no more.'

There is a memorable passage in our annals, which must be familiar to those who have read the old chronicles and records of our early colonial history. I allude to the consternation into which the General Court of the Massachusetts and their associated settlements were thrown, when their clerk read to them a letter from a worthy divine, purporting that he addressed them, not as magistrates, but as a set of Indian devils. The horror-stricken official paused in his prelection, aghast as was the clerk in England, for whose proper psalm a wag had substituted Chevy Chase,' when he came to the words 'woful hunting.' He looked at the manuscript again, and after a thorough examination, exclaimed, 'Yea! it is Indian devils!' A burst of indignation from the grave sanhedrim, long, loud, and deep, followed this declaration. They would all have better brooked to have been called by the name of Baptists, papists, or any other pestilent heretics, than to be branded as the very heathen whom they had themselves never scrupled to compliment, by calling them children of Beelzebub. If I remember aright, the venerable Cotton Mather notes, in his biographies of the eminent divines of his day, that the innocent offender was, in this instance, roughly handled by the secular arm of justice, for insulting the dignitaries both of church and state, before he had an opportunity of convincing his brother dignitaries that the offensive epithet, Indian devils, was a pure mistake in their manner of reading his epistle; inasmuch as he meant to employ the more harmless phrase, Individuals. The apology was accepted; though I observe that the latter word is, at present, deemed impolite, if not actionable, in Kentucky; and is as provoking to a citizen of that state, as it was to Dame Quickly to be called a woman, and a thing to thank God on, by Sir John Falstaff.

I knew a gentleman, who would have been very well pleased to have received a lucrative appointment, in a certain state of the Union; because his pratrimony was naught, and his professional profits, to speak mathematically, were less. His joy was unbounded, therefore, on reading a letter from a very great man, who wrote a very little and a very bad hand, responsive to his application for the

post which he coveted. He deciphered enough of the letter to make out, that many were soliciting the station for which he had applied, and that his testimonials had been received. But the concluding sentence was that from the favorable augury of which the young ambition of the aspirant ran at once, in imagination, to the top of its ladder. 6 Though last not least,' were the cabalistic words, by virtue of which he founded many Spanish castles; destined, alas! like those of Arabian enchantment, to vanish or fly away at the spell of a more powerful magician, or the loss of the talisman which summoned the genii to erect them. He might have launched into dangerous prodigality on the strength of his anticipated promotion, if a friend had not succeeded in convincing him, that the flourish with which the great man had terminated his honorable scrawl, if it was not a verse from the Koran, in the Arabic character, must have been meant for that very insignificant and unfruitful expression, Yours, in haste.'

6

No executive sunshine ever beamed on him. But being of a philosophic turn of mind, he devoted much of his time, for some years after his disappointment, to an analysis of the precise meaning of these three unlucky words, and read all the writers on our language, from the Diversions of Purley to the last wonderful discoveries on the subject made in this country. I suppose that he passed his time pleasantly in these researches, but not, I should think, very profitably: for the only result of all his reading, which I ever heard him utter, was, that yours, in haste,' is a most unphilosophical, ungrammatical, and nonsensical expression, involving a confusion of time, place, and circumstance. He said, it was a sorites of bulls; a metaphysical absurdity; a moral insult to good sense and good feeling; and that he never would continue a correspondence with any person who had used it in addressing him.

It is very easy to conceive what sad consequences may result in affairs of love and matrimony, from careless scribbling, by which ideas may be suggested directly the reverse of those intended to be expressed by the writer. In insinuating the delicate question orally, much ambiguity may be allowed for, on the score of anxiety and embarrassment; and it has always been understood, that the lady's answer, like a certain character in algebra, which combines the positive and negative signs, must be interpreted by accompanying circumstances; or rather, that it is like the adverb of answer, in some of the dead languages, which is both yea and nay, and requires an inclination of the head, or the expression of the countenance, to make it intelligible. Lawyers say, too, that it is difficult, in many cases, to prove a verbal promise of marriage. But equivocal writing has not the advantage of being illustrated by tone, glance, feature, or attitude, and may lead to very dangerous consequences.

In that department of the post-office, of which Cupid is master, the mails should contain only perfumed and gilt-edge billets, written in fair, soft, legible characters, like the correspondence of Julie and St. Preux, as conducted by their inspired amanuensis. I perceive these remarks have run to a greater extent than I had anticipated; and for this reason, but more particularly because I would not encourage fraud or deception, in any form or under any pretext, I will not even hint

at the possible advantages which may flow from bad or ambiguous hand-writings.

I can conceive no instance in which sound morality will tolerate the commission of such a thing, with malice afore-thought, or from sheer carelessness; unless it be where the ingenuity of the writer is taxed for common-place complimentary flourishes, or at the conclusion of an epistle. It is sometimes a very perplexing thing to make a proper obeisance at the end of a letter, when we are at a little loss about etiquette, or fear to be too formal or too familiar, too cold or too tender. Whether an imitation of the Chinese or the Sanscrit characters may be employed with propriety, in any such dilemma, is a case of conscience, which I will not undertake to decide. I must refer the reader to an excellent work by Mrs. Opie, with a most unfashionable name; and if such an evasion is not classed by her among the pecadilloes which she has denounced, it may be safely resorted to by the most scrupulous precisian.

THE LAST SONG.

A LEAF FROM THE PORT-FOLIO OF A BOOKWORM.