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his father, or with some physician of note in one of the nearest large towns.

66

Certainly, certainly," said Alfred Percival. "We had better, however, send to London itself for one of the leading medical authorities there."

"That will cost a power of money," threw in Mr. Daniel O'Flynn, who happened to be present.

"What does it signify how much it costs!" exclaimed Agues, with a glance of displeasure at O'Flynn.

"Not one of these learned gents will stir under a hundred pounds at the very least, travelling expenses paid over and above," persisted the attorney.

"No matter if the charge be a thousand pounds," replied Agnes, "so that a London physician and our own doctor here can, between them, save poor dear Mr. Montague an hour's suffering."

"Mr. Montague hates strangers. He won't see any London doctor," muttered O'Flynn.

"He will see one to please me, I know," said Agnes, "so, Alfred, do set about it at once."

Alfred gave a significant look to his friend O'Flynn, as much as to say, "Hold your tongue;" and the friend, obedient to the implied command, betook himself to unwonted silence.

Mrs. Percival soon afterwards left the room to return to her self-constituted duties in the chamber of the invalid, and then another conversation commenced between Alfred and the doctor.

Alfred expressed much anxiety lest his wife, whose health was at that time very delicate, should suffer from her close attendance on his uncle. "Between the baby and the old gentleman, I fear she will be quite worn out," he said, in a doleful tone; "she gets no sleep, and she eats nothing. She will be in your hands next, doctor, if all this is to go on." "We must, indeed, try to persuade her not to exert herself and fatigue herself so much," replied the doctor.

"She won't spare herself in the least, doctor, as long as Mrs. Winslow is head-nurse. And that good woman herself will be quite knocked up. She is not accustomed to such hard work; it is too much for her to be constantly in the sick-room day and night. It would be much better, on all accounts, to hire a regular sick-nurse. Besides, she will be much more au fait at all that should be done."

"Mrs. Winslow is an excellent sick-nurse," said the doctor, "but I quite agree with you that it would be better to employ a respectable woman who is accustomed to the business. She, at any rate, can take the night-work, and Mrs. Winslow can assist during the day."

It was then agreed between Mr. Percival and the doctor that O'Flynn should go to one of the larger towns near, and look out for a clever and experienced sick-nurse, as neither of the gentlemen thought any of the old women in the village would be quite competent to undertake the responsible office; and they further agreed, as proposed by Alfred, that Mr. Montague's confidential servant, Winslow, should be despatched to London for a first-rate physician. The doctor, indeed, thought that a letter by the post would answer the purpose, and save time, and he offered to write to one of the most celebrated physicians of the metro

polis, whom he knew personally. But Alfred insisted that there would be less delay by Winslow's going to London, for if the medical man first applied to could not come, he would be on the spot to go at once to another.

Winslow himself was very much annoyed to hear that he was to be sent on this long journey, for the entire country was not then intersected and covered with railroads as it is now, and even four horses were slow in comparison to the swiftness of steam. He urged that his master would not be able to do without him, that Mr. Alfred himself could be better spared, and also would manage the mission better. No-Mr. Alfred was quite determined that Winslow should go; nobody, he said, could so well describe Mr. Montague's state and feelings-nobody else in the establishment could be trusted-and as to himself, he would be the talk of the neighbourhood if he started off to London when his uncle was so ill.

Mr. Winslow shook his head ominously to his wife, and whispered: "I don't like this at all-I don't like it. Depend upon it, Martha, there's some mischief brewing, and that rascal O'Flynn has a hand in it. Keep a sharp look-out when I'm away. I pray to God that I may find my poor dear master alive when I come back! Oh! how I wish that Mr. Edgar were here!"

"Well! they say he is coming back soon. I wish that sweet, pretty

creature, Mrs. Percival, had been his wife instead of Mr. Alfred's.'

"She would have been better bestowed," said the butler. "Look here, Martha Mr. Alfred will bamboozle her-take care he does not bam

boozle you, too. Keep an eye on what's going on when I'm away. Remember this."

The suspicious Winslow was despatched to London by the mail that evening, the village doctor stayed with his patient until nearly midnight, when he left him to the care of Mrs. Percival and Mrs. Winslow, and Alfred and O'Flynn sat up also a great part of the night, though not in the chamber of the invalid.

Next morning O'Flynn went to the nearest town to inquire about an experienced and trustworthy sick-nurse. Some time after he had gone, Mr. Alfred Percival rode past the porter's lodge with a roll of paper in his hand. He stopped, and said to the porter's wife:

"If Mr. O'Flynn should return in my absence-he went to fetch a sick-nurse-tell him, if you please, that I have gone to his house to get his clerk to copy out a paper on business about which my poor uncle is very anxious. Beg him to wait until I come back."

"Yes, sir," said the woman, curtseying. "And how is the good

master now, sir ?"

"Rather better, I think," replied Alfred. "He has been able to give very clear directions about this paper;" and he pointed to the roll in his hand. 66 Yesterday he took no interest in anything."

"Thank God that he is better!" exclaimed the woman, fervently; and Mr. Alfred galloped off on his errand to the lawyer's clerk.

(35

A MERE QUESTION OF HANDWRITING.

BY FRANCIS JACOX.

HAMLET frankly owns, not without shame in the remembrance, that

-once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning,*

though a time was coming when the recently scouted accomplishment "did him yeoman's service"-in the way of forging the king's autograph, and thus substituting the lives, or deaths rather, of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz for his own. The use to which the Prince of Denmark applied his skill in caligraphy is open to certain ethical objections; but the testimony of so polished a glass of fashion and a mould of form, the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, the expectancy and rose of the fair state, the observed of all observers,-the testimony of so finished a gentleman in favour of writing fair, his recantation (with a subaudited peccavi) of the foppish contempt he once affected for so "snobbish" and bagman-like an acquisition, is memorable matter for writing-masters in particular, and for quill-drivers and gold, silver, or steel penholders, all and sundry.

There were seigneurs frivoles flourishing in France, in Alain Chartier's time, of whom that learned and rather pedantic person, the bekissed of Queen Margaret, reproachfully remarked, "qu'ils eussent tenu à reproche de bien lire et de bien écrire."+ We may suppose that the art of writing well, in which these nobles thought it foul scorn to be accomplished, would include orthography as well as caligraphy, spelling as well as handwriting.

Shakspeare hinted, no doubt, at the characteristic handwriting of contemporary statists, or statesmen, in his own land, when he made Hamlet speak as he does. One day that Mr. Pepys, of the Admiralty, visited his esteemed friend, Mr. Evelyn, and, as usual, had "most excellent discourse with him"-pitched in quite a different key from the familiar duets with Mistress Knipp- the visitor was gratified with a sight of "several letters of the old Lord of Leicester's, in Queen Elizabeth's time, under the very handwriting of Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Mary, Queen of Scots; and others, very venerable names.' And what reflection is suggested to our sagacious, sapid Samuel, who, on such occasions, is nothing if not critical, by these autograph reliques? "But, Lord! how poorly, methinks, they wrote in those days, and in what plain, uncut paper!" Mr. Pepys hugged himself complacently on the advance of civilisation, the progress of the species, and paper-making, and penmanship, and all that.

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And yet of Sir John Cheke and his generation-Sir John dying some seven years before Shakspeare was born-we are told, that not only did the accomplished knight write an excellent hand himself, but that all

*Hamlet, Act V. Sc. 2.

† See Léon Feugère, Caractères littéraires, &c.
Diary of Samuel Pepys, Nov. 24, 1665.

the best scholars in those times followed his example, “so that fair writing and good learning seemed to commence together.”*

The biographer of Bishop Copleston with some reason considers it by no means trivial to remark upon the extreme neatness and beauty of that prelate's handwriting, because, when this manner is uniformly preserved, as in the late Bishop of Llandaff's case, through life, “we prognosticate, without the aid of the graphiologist, clear thought and methodical accuracy." We are told, indeed, that to write intelligibly was matter of principle with Dr. Copleston; who thought that for any person, able to handle a pen, habitually to write otherwise, showed some degree of arrogance, or else of selfish carelessness. If this be a true bill, how many are the arrogant and the selfishly careless, let the compositors of every printing-house (for they best can) tell.

That Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, rugged man, who figures in Mr. Carlyle's latest history, "whose very face is the colour of gunpowder," and "who also knows French, and can even write in it if he like,”—of him we read, however, that he does not much practise writing, when it can be helped, and that he expressly did not teach his children to read or write, seeing no benefit in that effeminate art, but left them to pick it up as they could. Practically, and theoretically too, it seems, he held it a baseness to write fair—a blessedness to be not able to write at all.

Lord Chesterfield is a sufficient contrast in every respect to the rugged German prince; and one salient feature in the unlikeness, is the stress his lordship lays on the importance of graceful penmanship. Again and again he insists on his son's attention to this among the other graces. His reiterated appeals, advices, admonitions, and asseverations on the subject, may be summed up in this formula: "I maintain that it is in every man's 's power to write what hand he pleases, and consequently that he ought to write a good one."§ But long subsequent to the Chesterfield era, the elegant youth of England and France retained a class prejudice against running-hand fluencies, and took pretty much the same view of the question as Shakspeare's statists did. Mrs. Gore has a picture of a lady-killing poet, concerning whose educational experience, at Eton and elsewhere, the following passage is ironically suggestive :"Unluckily for Willoughby, Parnassus and the Pierian spring so far outweighed with him the attraction of the Christopher and its claret, that he suffered himself to fall into the anti-Etonian error of acquiring an admirable handwriting. Even at Prospect House he had been base][ enough to obtain the silver pen bestowed by the writing-master, as the annual prize of penmanship; and now, much sonneteering had betrayed him into the further disgrace of writing a legible hand." Mr. de Quincey relates how, at Bath, where the French emigrants mustered in great strength (six thousand, it was said), during the three closing years of the last century, he, then and there, through his mother's acquaintance with several leading families amongst them, gained a large expe

*See chap. cxcii. of Southey's Doctor.
+ Memoir of Bishop Copleston, p. 3.
History of Friedrich II., book iv. ch. ii.
Lord Chesterfield to his Son, Dec. 20, 1748.
Base the Shakspearian word: vide "Hamlet."
Sketches of the English: The Lady-Killer.

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rience of French caligraphy;-from which experience he learned that the French aristocracy still persisted, at that time, in a traditional contempt for all accomplishments of that class as clerkly and plebeian, "fitted only (as Shakspeare says, when recording similar prejudices amongst his own countrymen) to do 'yeoman's service'. . . . . All seemed to write the same hand, and with the same piece of most ancient wood, or venerable skewer; all alike scratching out stiff perpendicular letters, as if executed (I should say) with a pair of snuffers. I do not speak thus," continues the Opium-eater, "in any spirit of derision. Such accomplishments were wilfully neglected, and even ambitiously, as if in open proclamation of scorn for the arts by which humbler people often got their bread." Adding,* that a man of rank would no more conceive himself dishonoured by any deficiencies in the snobbish accomplishments of penmanship, grammar, or correct orthography, than a gentleman amongst ourselves by inexpertness in the mystery of cleaning shoes, or of polishing furniture.

In this particular only, then, can we suppose the Earl of Chesterfield to have not prided himself upon being very French. His lordship got on famously with the ancient noblesse, and they with him. But if we accept as correct the above report of their cacographic propensitiescacographic, of malice prepense-then must he have been shocked by their want of good taste (or, as he would have said, good sense), and they, scandalised in turn, by his palpably low breeding. He would call it their, and they would call it his, one defect. In all other regards he would account them a polished people, and they recognise in him a finished gentleman. But as regards the technical art of penmanship, they would appear as outer barbarians unto him, and to them he would seem, if not to speak in an unknown tongue, at least to write in an unknown hand.

Allusion has been made, in passing, to the frequency of his monitions in the matter of penmanship. Let us glance at one or two of these urgent injunctions. After making "a good hand" a condition sine quâ non to social culture, he proceeds to castigate Young Hopeful in the following style: "Your handwriting is a very bad one, and would make a scurvy figure in an office book of letters, or even in a lady's pocket-book. But that fault is easily cured by care, since every man who has the use of his right hand, can write whatever hand he pleases."+ Some six months later, on the prospect of young Stanhope being taken into Lord Albemarle's bureau in Paris: "You must [in that case] write a better hand than your common one, or you will get no great credit for your manuscripts; for your hand is at present an illiberal one: it is neither a hand of business, nor of a gentleman; but the hand of a schoolboy writing his exercise, which he hopes will never be read." It is to be observed that his lordship does not recognise a bad hand as the characteristic of his order; that is to say, not a bad hand, absolutely; though he does recognise, what obtains to the present day, and probably always will, a class distinction between the counting-house and the literate (or benefit of clergy) style.

In another letter he is at the pains to produce a fac-simile copy of Mr.

* Confessions of an English Opium-eater, edit. 1856.
† Chesterfield to his Son, July 9, 1750.

Idem, Jan. 3, 1751.

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