MORE AUTOGRAPHS

My suggestive friend has suddenly been multiplied a hundredfold. Handwriting is a subject which apparently makes a wide appeal. Each post brings me corrections or corroborations of what I wrote last Saturday. Fresh instances of enormity in the way of illegible writing are adduced from all quarters; nor are there wanting acrid critics who suggest that reform should begin at home, and that "the Author of Collections and Recollections" would do well to consult a writing-master, or to have his copy typed before it goes to the printers. Waiving these personalities, I turn again to my letter-case, and here let me say in passing that I committed a fearful indiscretion when I spoke of my "Collection" of autographs. That fatal word brought down an avalanche of "Collectors," who, hailing me as a man and a brother, propose all sorts of convenient exchanges. A gentleman who cherishes a postcard from Mr. Rudyard Kipling would exchange it for an unpublished letter of Shelley; and a maiden-lady at Weston-super-Mare, whose great-aunt corresponded with Eliza Cook, will refuse no reasonable offer.

But all these handsome propositions must be brushed aside, for I have no collection of autographs, if "collection" implies any art or system in the way in which they have been brought together, or any store of saleable duplicates. Mine are simply letters addressed to myself or to my kinsfolk, plus just a very few which have come into my hands in connexion with public business; but, such as they are, they are full of memories and morals.

Why did very old people write so well? I have already described the writing of Samuel Rogers, of the Waterloo Lord Albemarle, and of Sir Theodore Martin. Pretty well for octogenarian penmanship; but I can enlarge the gallery. A bundle of octogenarian letters lies before me as I write. Oliver Wendell Holmes sends a tribute to Matthew Arnold. Charles Villiers accepts an invitation to dinner. Lord Norton invites me to stay at Hams. Archdeacon Denison complains of "his first attack of gout at eighty-five." Mr. Leveson-Gower at eighty-six thanks me for a review of his first book. I protest that there is not an ungraceful line—scarcely a misshaped letter—in any of these five manuscripts. Here is a small, elegant, and "taily" hand, rather like an old-fashioned lady's. The signature is

"Yours sincerely,

Eversley,"

better known as Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, the most authoritative Speaker the House of Commons ever had. Note that this was written in his eighty-eighth year, and he lived to buy a new pair of guns after he was ninety. Here is a strong, clear, well-defined writing, setting forth with precision and emphasis the reasons why the last Duke of Cleveland, then in his eighty-fifth year, will not give more than £5 for an object which he has been asked to help. The writing of the beloved and honoured Duke of Rutland, always graceful and regular, becomes markedly smaller, though not the least less legible, till he dies at eighty-seven. There is no more vigorous, even dashing, signature in my store than "G. J. Holyoake," written in July 1905. Close to the imperial purple of the Agitator's ink nestles, in piquant contrast, a small half-sheet of rose-pink paper bearing a Duchess's coronet and cypher. The writing is distinct and ornamental; the letter was written in 1880, and the writer was born in 1792. But the mere fact of attaining to eighty or ninety years will not absolutely guarantee, though it seems to promote, legibility of writing. My venerable friend Dean Randall, who was born in 1824, ends a letter, which certainly needs some such apology, with a disarming allusion to the "dreadful scrawl" of his "ancient MS."; and four sides of tantalizing hieroglyphics, drawn apparently with a blunt stick, are shown by external evidence to be a letter from Canon Carter of Clewer when he had touched his ninetieth birthday.

On similarity, approaching to identity, between the writings of very dissimilar persons I have already remarked, and a further illustration comes to light as I turn over my papers. Here are two letters in the graceful and legible script of the early nineteenth century, with long S's, and capitals for all the substantives. Both are evidently the handiwork of cultivated gentlemen; and both the writers, as a matter of fact, were clergymen. But there the resemblance stops. The one was "Jack" Russell, the well-known Sporting Parson of Exmoor; the other was Andrew Jukes, the deepest and most influential Mystic whom the latter-day Church has seen.

When I praise gracefulness in writing I mean natural and effortless grace, such as was displayed in the writing of the late Duke of Westminster. But, if we admire writing artificially fashioned and coerced into gracefulness like a clipped yew, it would be difficult to excel the penmanship of the late George Augustus Sala, who was an engraver before he was an author; or that of Sir A. Conan Doyle, who handles a pen as dexterously as in his surgical days he wielded the lancet. I praised just now the late Duke of Westminster's writing, and of him one might say what Scott said, in a different sense, of Byron—that he "managed his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality"; but there is another kind of grace than that—the grace which is partly the result of mental clearness and partly of a cultured eye. Here are two specimens of such writing, the letters so alluringly fashioned that they look, as some one said, like something good to eat; and spaced with a care which at once makes reading easy, and testifies to clear thinking in the writer. Both are the writings of Scholars, and both of men who wrote a vast deal in their lives—Bishop Creighton and Dean Vaughan. It must have been a joy to read their Proofs. The late Dean Farrar was the only Public-School Master I ever knew who took pains with his pupils' writing and encouraged them to add grace to legibility. His own writing, small, upright, and characterful, was very pretty when he took time and pains; but the specimen which lies before me shows sad signs of the havoc wrought by incessant writing against time.

Grace and legibility are the two chief glories of penmanship, but other attributes are not without their effect. A dashing scrawl, if only it is easy to read, suggests a soaring superiority to conventional restraints, and rather bespeaks a hero. Here are two scrawls, and each is the work of a remarkable person. One is signed "Yours truly, Jos. Cowen," and I dare say that some of my readers would see in it the index to a nature at once impetuous and imperious. But Mr. Cowen's scrawl was crowquill-work and copperplate compared with its next-door neighbour. "Accept the enclosed, dear Mr. Russell," covers the whole of one side of a sheet of letter-paper; the ink is blue; the paper is ribbed; the signature, all wreathed in gigantic flourishes and curling tails, is "Laura Thistlethwaite," and the enclosed is one of the Evangelistic Addresses of that gifted preacher who once was Laura Bell. Odd incongruities keep turning up. As I pass from the Evangelical lady-orator, I come to Father Ignatius, an Evangelical orator with a difference, but with a like tendency to scrawl. Lord Leighton's writing is also a scrawl, and, it must be confessed, an egotistical scrawl, and a very bad scrawl to read. An illegible scrawl, too, is the writing of Richard Holt Hutton, but his is not a vainglorious or commanding scrawl, but rather humble and untidy. "Henry Irving" is a signature quite culpably illegible, but "Squire Bancroft" is just irregular enough to be interesting though not unreadable.

Per contra, I turn to one of the most legible signatures in my possession. The writing is ugly and the letters are ill-formed, looking rather like the work of a hand which has only lately learned to write and finds the act a difficulty. But it is as clear as print, and it shows no adventitious ornamentation or self-assertive twirls. The signature is

"Yours most sincerely,

Randolph S. Churchill."

In this case, if in no other, the oracles of Caligraphy are set at naught. Here is a fine, twisty, twirling hand, all tails and loops, but not at all unsightly. The signature reads like "Lincoln," and only a careful study would detect that the "L" of "Lincoln" is preceded by a circular flourish which looks like part of the L but is really a capital C. It is the signature of that great scholar, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln; and I remember that, in days of ecclesiastical strife, it was once imputed to that apostolic man for vanity that he signed his name "Lincoln" like a Temporal Peer. From that day he defined the "C" more carefully.

To the last letter which I bring to light to-day a different kind of interest attaches. It is dated

"Dingle Bank, Liverpool,

April 13, 1888."

The writing is small and clear, with the upstrokes and downstrokes rather long in comparison with the level letters; but some small blurs and blots show that the letter was written in unusual haste. It ends with these words: "Smalley has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again.

"Ever yours,

M. A."

This was the last letter which Matthew Arnold ever wrote, and it closed a friendship which had been one of the joys and glories of my life.