PART ONE Penmanship The Origin and Progress of Writing. "Tis to the pen alone we mortals owe All we believe and almost all we know." Up to a certain point the history of writing or penmanship is the history of literature. This point we will endeavor to reach as rapidly as possible, so as to narrow the field to be traversed to the special question of the origin and progress of our modern hand-writing. Hence it will be unnecessary in a sketch like this to trace the advance of the art from hieroglyphics or pictures to its present stage, which, for all we know, may be as far behind the writing of the future as we are in advance of the peculiar penmanship of the Chinese. Still it may be of interest to note how the necessity for clear, rapid, and reliable transmission of ideas has produced our present perfection; just as the necessity for a still more rapid transfer of expression has evolved good shorthand or phonography. According to various authorities. "all the European alphabets come from the old Phoenician through different channels, each nation in succession taking the letters it needed, omitting the rest. Afterwards as its literature and mode of speech extended, some of the rejected letters were replaced, not in their original position, which was already occupied by a new form of an old letter, but at the close of the whole. And hence the alphabet of the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French 9 Inapiens q fimiliter a dextro angulo ogientali alphabetî latine Caubaqulq infimlbaum angulum odentalem. A·B⋅CO⋅E⋅EO.HI.K.LD. Illud pontificale feat labi dris laurenaus Epitopus anulidyozentis ordinis featum pdicatozu: Ammo dni eh. cece.rrrvi. enfuit completu quinta die Junń. Specimen of Black Letter Writing from a Manuscript of 1472. languages, though substantially one, differ mainly in the signs they use for sounds peculiar to each." The Phoenician language was supposed to have directly produced the Semitic and Greek languages. The Phoenician language itself is believed to be of Egyptian origin, improving and developing its signs and letters to meet the commercial necessities of the time. Recent researches among the cuneiform or wedge-shaped letters of Assyria point strongly to these as the parent forms of the Etruscan language, and are evidently to be regarded as rude originals of our own. However, it may be possible that the Assyrians developed their alphabet directly from the simpler and less pictorial Egyptian forms, improving the letters just as they introduced innovations in the materials for writing, thus enabling them to transmit to our own day indestructible libraries of brick which are, perhaps, the most important records bequeathed to us by antiquity. We are, now-a-days, disposed to accept the cuneiform as the earliest known alphabetic writing. The Anglo-Saxon alphabet is considered to have been taken directly from the Latin. The Celts of the early Roman periodthe centuries immediately before and after Christ-used both the Roman and occasionally the Greek lettering as seen in the remaining coins of that period. Our present cosmopolitan alphabet comes from the Latin, but through the Norman. It does not differ in essentials among the cultivated languages of Europe and America, which are mainly of Latin derivation, and thus preserve a certain amount of uniformity; while the fact that Latin was the learned language of all Europe during the middle ages, facilitated this result. These more modern Roman characters have proved adaptable to a running hand to a degree impossible to the Greek, the latter having retained too long its Archaic form of severity of type-the letters declining to flow into one another with the necessary ease. The running hand among the Saxons is considered first to have come into use at the end of the ninth century, being merely an attempt to attain more rapid movement of the set-Saxon, the regular hand commonly used in manuscripts, speed being required by the constantly increasing literary activity of that age. There is little doubt that, but for the Norman invasion Scipio Nafira cum ad Poëtam Enniu. cum ad Poëtam Eminu Venißßet, eig, abo m n o p q r s Brux j j J & Early Specimens of Flowing Handwriting. (Urbanus Wyse, 1549.) this would have remained the national style of handwriting, and England would have found herself, like Germany, isolated from the Latin races in the character of its writing. But William the Conqueror, shortly after his accession in 1066, adopted what may be called the European or Roman system of lettering, upon which our own method is based. In western Europe generally the minuscule or small hand, becoming nationalized, ran its course down to the time of the invention of printing, when the so-called black-letter or book-hand of the fifteenth century in Germany and other countries furnished models for printing types. But in Italy with the revival of learning, a more refined taste prevailed, in the production of the manuscripts, and Italian writers went back to earlier periods in search of a better standard of writing. Hence in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, manuscripts written on the lines of the Italian hand of the early twelfth century began to appear, and became continually more numerous. This revived hand was brought to perfection soon after the middle of the fifteenth century, just at the right moment to be adopted by the early Italian printers, and to be perpetuated by them in their types. Upon the invention of printing in Germany the letters made use of were naturally the old Gothic or German, but when the new art passed into Italy the Roman characters were substituted, and soon proved their greater suitability by reason of their greater simplicity. One might be inclined to believe that the manuscript modern hand had been directly taken by the printed forms if one did not know that it was just the reverse. The earliest printing was in imitation of manuscripts, the sheet being placed upon the block and engraved; and the block impression having been ironed out of the back of the sheet, two of these were pasted together so as exactly to resemble and pass for manuscripts. We are inclined to date the growth of our modern running hand from the invention of Italics, by Aldus Manutius, of Venice, about the year 1500, and consequently consider its progress at all events as contemporaneous with that of printing. No doubt running hands of various kinds had been in use in Italy from the earliest times for unimportant documents, and may have formed |