larity to their line, and have made our
handwritings as monotonous as are our characters in the present habits
of society. The true physiognomy of writing will be lost among our
rising generation: it is no longer a face that we are looking on, but a
beautiful mask of a single pattern; and the fashionable handwriting of
our young ladies is like the former tight-lacing of their mothers'
youthful days, when every one alike had what was supposed to be a fine
shape!

Assuredly nature would prompt every individual to have a distinct sort
of writing, as she has given a peculiar countenance--a voice--and a
manner. The flexibility of the muscles differs with every individual,
and the hand will follow the direction of the thoughts and the emotions
and the habits of the writers. The phlegmatic will portray his words,
while the playful haste of the volatile will scarcely sketch them; the
slovenly will blot and efface and scrawl, while the neat and
orderly-minded will view themselves in the paper before their eyes. The
merchant's clerk will not write like the lawyer or the poet. Even
nations are distinguished by their writing; the vivacity and
variableness of the Frenchman, and the delicacy and suppleness of the
Italian, are perceptibly distinct from the slowness and strength of pen
discoverable in the phlegmatic German, Dane, and Swede. When we are in
grief, we do not write as we should in joy. The elegant and correct
mind, which has acquired the fortunate habit of a fixity of attention,
will write with scarcely an erasure on the page, as Fenelon, and Gray,
and Gibbon; while we find in Pope's manuscripts the perpetual struggles
of correction, and the eager and rapid interlineations struck off in
heat. Lavater's notion of handwriting is by no means chimerical; nor was
General Paoli fanciful, when he told Mr. Northcote that he had decided
on the character and dispositions of a man from his letters, and the
handwriting.

Long before the days of Lavater, Shenstone in one of his letters said,
"I want to see Mrs. Jago's handwriting, that I may judge of her temper."
One great truth must however be conceded to the opponents of _the
physiognomy of writing_; general rules only can be laid down. Yet the
vital principle must be true that the handwriting bears an analogy to
the character of the writer, as all voluntary actions are characteristic
of the individual. But many causes operate to counteract or obstruct
this result. I am intimately