being refused admission into several merchants'
counting-houses on account of my " hand," I
was placed with a wholesale tobacconist in
Oxford Street, to learn the business. My
education was at an end, and my penmanship
being left to itself, to proceed upon the
beautiful no-foundation just described, I gradually
fell into a sort of writing of the very worst
kind—slow and shapeless, or rapid and
illegible, and seldom twice alike. This
continued through years, under various
circumstances of life, till here I am, a tobacconist of
forty, who can't write his wife's Christian
name in a manner fit to be read!

It may here be asked, by those who
consider this matter of hand-writing in a
mechanical light, whether there is not something
awkward or unsuitable in the shape of my
hand and fingers, or a certain inflexibility,
inapt at all neat and curious manipulations?
Not so; but the contrary. I inherit from
my father an artist's hand—not elegant in
shape, but small, flexible, and having a
natural instinct and cunning for any nice
operations. My father, besides his matchless
"penmanship," was not only a devout
admirer of Gerard Dow, and all the Dutch
painters, who finished everything to the
minutest touch, but often amused himself
with making copies of some fine etchings
from these. This I also did, and attained
such proficiency with my pen in making pen
and ink drawings that they could scarcely
be known from copper-plate etchings. I
likewise took readily to musical instruments;
and I did not find the same degree of
difficulty in the manipulation of strings, the
stopping of " ventiges," or the touching of
keys, that is common to nearly all beginners.
I began with ease, and always improved
rapidly in proportion to finding time to
practise. I have a turn for cabinet-making, am a
good plain carpenter (I had almost said
"cook "), have some skill in practical mechanics,
and the use of all the tools and instruments,
and believe that if I had been a
dentist, I could have taken out a double tooth
in a manner that would have delighted you.

But is there no other reason, besides early
misdirection and cruel treatment, for the
infamous scrawl I write? Is there nothing in
my nervous temperament and character which
may account for it, or at least bring in a new
and important element to the consideration?

If my father was a slow, skilful,
painstaking, fine-finishing, phlegmatic Dutchman,
what was my mother? I shall say briefly,
that Madam van Ploos was a fiery-spirited
Spanish lady, who always very much looked
down upon my father, and despised his
"hand." Her parents had made up the
match, she being quite a girl at the time.
She was my father's opposite in most things.
She had no patience, no sort of application,
no natural skill in anything; she had
extraordinary energies and animal spirits, did
everything upon impulse, and alternated the
warmest affections and tenderness with
frequent bursts of fury that sometimes made my
father's pen fly clean out of his hand!

But let us now consider a little as to what
is going on "within." Now must come my
statement of what I feel—of my natural
ordinary sensations, in the act of writing.
My thoughts, ideas, or in short, the impressions
and opinions I wish to convey upon
paper, come upon my mind with such a rush—
all at the pit entrance, and all trying at once
to get through the door—that I have
absolutely no patience to make a letter, but rush
scrawling along, so that it often happens I
cannot myself read what I have written, on
turning to it a few days afterwards. The
reason is—it is not writing at all, but a set of
strange marks and cyphers of no system.
Would any good early teaching have
superseded this? I think, in a great degree, it
would. It would not have prevented a rapid
scrawl, which is the result of a peculiar
character in mind and temperament; but it
would have a strong tendency to render the
scrawl legible.

The question of how far the character of
men is to be known by their handwriting,
involves many very curious and interesting
considerations. By some it has been regarded
as a matter of divination or conjuring; but in
any case there is something true to be made of
it. We see advertisements, from time to time,
in the newspapers, offering to divine and
divulge the character of any unknown person
whose handwriting is brought to them, at the
small charge of five shillings per character.
By these means men, about to engage in
partnership, or to have important transactions
with any one, may know before-hand the
character of the person with whom they will
have to do; in like manner lovers may be
made wise beforehand, and those who have
secret enemies may be warned and enabled to
prepare for the worst. Is this all nonsense?
Not all; but it is simply pushing, as we
commonly see, a fact beyond its legitimate
bounds, till it becomes an absurdity, and no
fact at all worth a pinch of snuff.

Sitting in the little back parlour of my shop
at Knightsbridge, trying the merits of several
new cases of pipes from Holland, to see how
they performed, I fell into a long meditation,
the other day, on this very subject, and, as cloud
after cloud rose with august placidity into the
air, and bowed its volume down from the
ceiling, to expand and disperse itself all over the
room, it seemed to me that I had elaborated
and mastered the comprehension of the whole
of the subject,—though I had lost several
customers in consequence, who, I believe, had
entered my shop, and gone out again, none the
wiser.

In the proposition that character can be
discovered by the handwriting, there is some
truth, which may be considered under several
distinct heads:—

1st. Physiologically. As the nervous system