Now to Sir Robert. Who does not discern in the free, clear, bold stroke of the Premier the suavity, self-reliance, and polished surface of the man who can adopt if not conceive large plans, and who is conscious of the power to execute them in successive detail: withal it is the hand of acknowledged mastery; it is the hand that guides the reins but holds the whip, and that can apply the lash either to his own restive cattle or to the rival drove that may attempt to cross his path.

If we turn to the Throne itself, we recognise at once the hand of ability and determination; the hand of one who feels that she has a moral power as well as a political right to command. In her royal husband's caligraphy we see the prudent, subservient, and well-conducted consort of the Queen, one who is satisfied with his good fortune, and who will not easily be drawn into any diversion which should mar his nuptial bliss. His is not the hand of a conspirator-he could not become one: Hail to the auspicious union! Court vice is gone out of fashion, and dissipation and obscenity have become disreputable!

Perhaps, after all, the personal character is not so fully shewn by the caligraphy of royalty, nobility, statesmen, and lawyers, as in the literary and scientific classes, owing to their having less practice in it, and thereby becoming less independent of the conventional forms of letters. In general, such persons write but little, and hence they always feel to a certain degree in trammels. The scientific man writes much more, and usually with greater freedom of motion; and the literary man in a still greater degree than the man of science. In scientific hands, however, we find a great diversity. Mathematicians and physical enquirers for the most part think slowly and deliberately-this is characterized by their uniform letters and regular lineation. The chemist, the anatomist, and experimenter in general, write an irregular and rapid hand-characteristic of the rough notebook, and a proof that writing is both an interruption and a drudgery. Fancy philosophers, like all other fancy men, are no criterion of men of science: but for the most part these are somewhat punctilious respecting the visual character of their manuscripts-bespeaking by neat or showy caligraphy your considerate regard for the lore that it shadows forth. I have seen many such manuscripts, and I am almost led to suspect the soundness, originality, and worth of any paper which comes in the guise of a careful hand-mathematical perhaps excepted. Experience has taught me that it is an almost universal truth, that a paper upon the writing of which much time and labour of a manual kind have been bestowed, is seldom of much scientific value.

The Obligation Book' of the Royal Society, which contains the signature of every member from its foundation, furnishes a good criterion by which to test the character of the man by his caligraphy. The manuscript letters and treatises in its Library also contribute much to this purpose; and the manuscript papers which have been presented bear the same general testimony. Few, very few of these MSS. are written in a free and rapid manner: they all partake of the slow and hesitating character of the mental labours of their authors; for the most part written with care, and as if the pen sympathised with the labour of the investigation-very seldom with the slap-dash freedom' of a writer who felt an habitual confidence in his own conclusions. Still this is not universal: there are some good, free, bold hands to be found even here.

Compare the penmanship of Newton with that of Flamsteed or Halley. Newton's was elaborate, and every letter carefully and distinctly formed-all in the slender Italian style: Flamsteed's was free and open, written to express what he had to say distinctly, but with effort to please his own or any other eye: Halley's letters were well-formed, but with a freedom and grace.. fulness that was by no means common in his day. Not only are the intellectual characters of these three indicated by their caligraphy, but their personal dispositions too. Newton's, close, wary, suspicious: Flamsteed's, oneness of purpose, freedom from abject servility, and consciousness of his own personal integrity: Halley's, imagination, taste, and unlimited diversity of power. We might, similarly, institute comparison between most of the 'men of mark' whose names figure in the Obligation Book,' and whose productions are consecrated by being deposited in the dusty archives of the Royal Society. We must, however, come at once to recent and present times.

That universal genius, Dr. Thomas Young, whose learning and whose science were equally distinguished, and whose laborious life was one continued scene of sleepless activity-does not his rapid, elegant, unshrinking, untired hand declare him? The careful precision of Wollaston, that never omitted a letter in his writing, or omitted a circumstance in his tiny but conclusive experiments-is it not visible in his pennatular delineations? And Davy-the dashing, fearless, frank manipulations of his quill bespeak the man whose mind never quailed, and whose patience never wearied under any scientific or literary difficulty. Of the presidential order, too, there was Banks, whose handwriting bespoke him to be always in the imperative mood: Gilbert-but really I know not what to call it-and yet he was a good man and true: the royal duke who wrote like his family, fond of display, and deeply in love with popularity: the present president

-whose hand, like himself, is quiet and gentlemanlike'-and little more. The hands of the secretaries are also eminently characteristic: the senior-easy, ready, and practised—as one accustomed to press-work more than to original investigation: the junior-crabbed, mean, and jealous, as though his very ink were abstracted from the vinegar-cruet, and qualified with a touch of gall.

Of the Fellows themselves, much might be added, did space allow we may speak of the carefully-formed hand of Babbage, and the singular mixture of care and recklessness in that of Herschel and in fact, of nearly all-save only one exception, that of Faraday. His hand is an anomaly, which defies all interpretation for whilst the vigour of his mind and the delicacy of his philosophical perception render him beyond comparison the most distinguished of living English chemists, his penmanship would betoken the feeblest class of intellect, and the most uncultivated and illiterate of our fellow-men! It must be the result of sheer negligence: much may be attributed to the introduction of steel pens. Oh! those products of Vulcan's forgethe steel pens! They have destroyed the character of every man's caligraphy who has adopted the use of them! And in this way alone can I account for the hand of a Faraday !

In the hands of the purely literary man the pen becomes a true and unmistakeable index of mental character and personal feeling. With him the thought is everything-the caligraphy nothing, or a mere unavoidable incumbrance upon his faculties. He employs every contrivance for abbreviation to enable his flagging yet swift-winged pen to keep pace with his soaring conceptions-no loop to his e, no dot to his i, no cross to his t, no idle strokes, no flourishes, no waste of muscular power, no separation of letters, or even of words, to require the lifting up of his pen. His very letters are elliptical,-his stops are forgottenand his capitals but half-formed. This is most so with the most impetuous and most talented of the race. In the writing of such a man you see character individualised; a hand of this class once seen will be recognized again, even under all attempts at disguise, and under all the variation of feeling, circumstance, and purpose. Who, for instance, would not recognize the authorship of Don Juan in the MS. that had seen the printer's copy of Childe Harold? Who that compared the caligraphy of Lalla Rookh with that of Tom Little's translation of the Odes of Anacreon, would scruple to say that Tom Little and Tom Moore were related to the amount of positive identity? Under every phase, Byron is the same

.

Under every aspect and every guise, Moore is the same courtiergeneral, the same self-appointed laureate of

Woman, dear woman!'

Byron's is the hand for a manly challenge with pen or pistolMoore's, elegant and petit as himself, calculated to adorn an album or pen a poetic billet. Yet both are rapid, free, and characteristic of self-reliance and confidence in all their aims.

We might run over the cases of our most illustrious authors past and present. We may begin with Shakspeare and his cotemporaries-we may speak of the Commonwealth period-we may come down to the (falsely called) Augustan age of Marlborough's queen-may specify the careful correcting hand of Pope, the strongly characteristic caligraphy of the artful Addison' or passing over the partially barren remainder of the last century, come to Cowper and to Burns, and to the host who succeeded them in detail. All tell the same story; and that story is cumulative evidence that, as a general rule, a man's free and unrestrained caligraphy bespeaks his mental and his per

sonal character.

But it is not by poets alone that this is demonstrated. Who does not see in Johnson's positive and commanding caligraphy the brusquerie of his manners, as well as the dominant spirit of the man who held the literati of his time' in a state of perfect subjugation, even when most of them were greatly his superiors in worldly fortune? Could we recover his first note to Cave under the fictitious signature of Samuel Smith, we cannot doubt that it would bespeak the future dictator in the world of letters. Compare this with the hand of his polite' patron, Chesterfield -it is comparing the rough fearless hand of conscious power with the namby-pamby execution of the fribble of fashion. Look again at the penmanship of the proud Warburton, the cautiously elegant Adam Smith, of the all-searching Gibbon, of the philosophic but paradoxical Hume, of the pompous Blair, and of the careful, matter-of-fact, but polished Robertson. All bear out my proposition to the letter.

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If we come to our contemporaries, we have a key to decipher them, provided we can only get into some of the chief printingoffices in London: or conversely, from reading the printed works we may readily guess at the manuscripts from which they have been deciphered. For instance, who that was admitted confidentially to an office in Whitefriars would not be prepared to expect to find the weekly scraps which are manufactured into 'Punch,' written as if with the end of that facetious gentleman's red nose, after an encounter with the executioner had made a slit in it, and furnished it with red ink by the same process?

Occasionally with the end of his baton—or sometimes with a pen shaped out of the corvine plume which he bad plucked from the tender part of a poor-law commissioner?

What secrets, too, would a practised eye descry within the sanctum of Ingram Court! Would not many a proof be afforded by stray papers there of the truth of our theory? Men who had been known by their caligraphy in science alone have had style of composition' in literary articles affiliated on them by a sort of common consent. I happen to know both the real and affiliated parent of certain articles in Wade's Review; and I do not greatly wonder at the mistake, for there is much fraternity of character in the two. Their career is, however, not the same: though it is wishing well to our species to wish that the intellectual independence which characterizes both should be more frequently found amongst men in an age of eminently independent habits of mind. There is an equal fraternity of caligraphy in these two writers-yet they are not identical.

The same conclusions might be deduced from a confidential access to any other great printing-house in London, as Spottiswoode's, Clowes's, Moyes's, Clay's, Cox's, Gilbert's: but circumstances have given me the means of judging, independently of any nefarious curiosity respecting the secrets of businesshouses-I am able to affirm that the leading literary men in London do, by their ordinary press-copies, add undeniable proof of our general proposition.

Instances may be multiplied without end of analogies between intellectual character and an author's penmanship, as well as in the cases of statesmen and distinguished personages of every class. I have, however, been already more discursive than I contemplated. Still these instances have not been given without an aim: and it was my intention to deduce some useful practical suggestions and conclusions from them, that might be of real service. I find I must defer them for the present, and shall conclude with a remark on the characteristics of national caligraphy.

The English people write in a much more diversified style than those of any other country in Europe. With us there is a tendency to a wild freedom of hand that is unexampled in France, Germany, or Italy--and exceeded only by that of the Emerald Islanders. An Irishman's pen reminds one of the shillelagh and Donnybrook-and his letters would be a good illustration of the arms and legs of Handy Andy and Dick the Divil' in their scuffle in the ditch!

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The Scotchman, on the contrary, plies his pen with the quiet, regular, placid, and Macsycophant air with which he would boo' to his patron. He keeps steadily to his purpose-his hand is