for the luxurious, under the tempting names
of ruby pen, or diamond pen—with the plain
gold pen, and the rhodium pen, for those who
were sceptical as to the jewellery of the
inkstand. The economical use of the quill
received also the attention of science. A
machine was invented to divide the barrel
lengthwise into two halves; and, by the same
mechanical means, these halves were sub-
divided into small pieces, cut pen-shape, slit,
and nibbed. But the pressure upon the quill
supply grew more and more intense. A new
power had risen up in our world—a new seed
sown—the source of all good, or the dragon's
teeth of Cadmus. In 1818 there were only
one-hundred and sixty-five thousand scholars
in the monitorial schools—the new schools,
which were being established under the
auspices of the National Society, and the
British and Foreign School Society. Fifteen
years afterwards, in 1833, there were three-
hundred and ninety thousand. Ten years
later, the numbers exceeded a million. Even
a quarter of a century ago two-thirds of the
male population of England, and one-half of
the female, were learning to write; for in the
Report of the Registrar- General for 1846, we
find this passage:—" Persons when they are
married are required to sign the marriage-
register; if they cannot write their names,
they sign with a mark: the result has hitherto
been, that nearly one man in three, and one
woman in two, married, sign with marks."
This remark applies to the period between
1839 and 1845. Taking the average age of
men at marriage as twenty-seven years, and
the average age of boys during their education
as ten years, the marriage-register is an
educational test of male instruction for the
years 1824-28. But the gross number of
the population of England and Wales was
rapidly advancing. In 1821 it was twelve
millions; in 1831, fourteen millions; in 1841,
sixteen millions; in 1851, taking the rate of
increase at fourteen per cent., it will be
eighteen millions and a half. The extension
of education was proceeding in a much quicker
ratio; and we may therefore fairly assume
that the proportion of those who make their
marks in the marriage-register has greatly
diminished since 1844.

But, during the last ten years, the natural
desire to learn to write, of that part of the
youthful population which education can
reach, has received a great moral impulse by
a wondrous development of the most useful
and pleasurable exercise of that power. The
uniform penny postage has been established.
In the year 1838, the whole number of letters
delivered in the United Kingdom was seventy-
six millions; in this year that annual delivery
has reached the prodigious number of three
hundred and thirty-seven millions. In 1838,
a Committee of the House of Commons thus
denounced, amongst the great commercial
evils of the high rates of postage, their
injurious effects upon the great bulk of the
people:—"They either act as a grievous tax
on the poor, causing them to sacrifice their
little earnings to the pleasure and advantage
of corresponding with their distant friends,
or compel them to forego such intercourse
altogether; thus subtracting from the small
amount of their enjoyments, and obstructing
the growth and maintenance of their best
affections." Honoured be the man who broke
down these barriers! Praised be the Government
that, for once, stepping out of its fiscal
tram-way, dared boldly to legislate for the
domestic happiness, the educational progress,
and the moral elevation of the masses! The
steel pen, sold at the rate of a penny a dozen,
is the creation, in a considerable degree, of the
Penny Postage stamp; as the Penny Postage
stamp was a representative, if not a creation,
of the new educational power. Without the
steel pen, it may reasonably be doubted
whether there were mechanical means within
the reach of the great bulk of the population
for writing the three hundred and thirty-
seven millions of letters that now annually
pass through the Post Office.

Othello's sword had "the ice-brook's
temper; " but not all the real or imaginary
virtues of the stream that gave its value to
the true Spanish blade could create the
elasticity of a steel pen. Flexible, indeed, is the
Toledo. If thrust against a wall, it will bend
into an arc that describes three-fourths of a
circle. The problem to be solved in the steel
pen, is to convert the iron of Dannemora into a
substance as thin as the quill of a dove's pinion,
but as Strong as the proudest feather of an
eagle's wing. The furnaces and hammers of the
old armourers could never have solved this
problem. The steel pen belongs to our age
of mighty machinery. It could not have
existed in any other age. The demand for
the instrument, and the means of supplying
it, came together.

The commercial importance of the steel pen
was first manifested to our senses a year or
two ago at Sheffield. We had witnessed all
the curious processes of converting iron into
steel, by saturating it with carbon in the
converting furnace;—of tilting the bars so
converted into a harder substance, under the
thousand hammers that shake the waters of
the Sheaf and the Don; of casting the steel
thus converted and tilted into ingot's of higher
purity; and, finally, of milling, by which the
most perfect development of the material is
acquired under enormous rollers. About two
miles from the metropolis of steel, over whose
head hangs a canopy of smoke through which
the broad moors of the distance sometimes
reveal themselves, there is a solitary mill
where the tilting and rolling processes are
carried to great perfection. The din of the
large tilts is heard half a mile off. Our ears
tingle, our legs tremble, when we stand close
to their operation of beating bars of steel into
the greatest possible density; for the whole
building vibrates as the workmen swing before