The Prince George's enquirer and southern Maryland advertiser. (Upper Marlborough, Md.) 1882-1925, 1898-11-18
ILLEGIBLE WRITING.

1t is the perversity of human nature
that people who ought to do one thing
do another. Men who write legible
hand mo one can accomplish more
than that now will use typewriter,
and others, who ought never to be
trusted with pen, order them by the
gross and take the discount. Rud-
yard Kipling writes a neat, delicate
hand, and Conan Doyle's is as plain as
the proverbial pikestaG, but both use
machines. 1t would have saved Il
great deal Of misery and helped to per-
petuate 4 useful art if other writer's of
cmincnce could have been prevailed
Il 'nn to type. Unfortunately the
typewriter was too 5elated an inven-
ton to affect many of the best bad
writers. Carlyle would not have
struggled with keyboard, but would
have prevented that miserable com
positor fleeing from London out Of his
way if he had. Carly les, however,
was Il copperplatG to others that could
be mentioned. IIuyos manuscripts,
We are told, presented the appearance
Ola sort of battlefield on paper. in
which the killed words were well
-
pushed forward in anything but good
order Napoleon was unique in every
thing, even in his handwriting. His
letters from Gcrm,ny to Josephine
were at first taken for maps of the
seat of war. And his signature was
an indistinguishable hieroglyphic. By
ron and Dean Stanley wrote atrocious
fists and it is said that Sydney
Smiths was no better, although he
used to chaf jeffrey badly. He used
to say that he read Jeffrey from left
to right, and his wife from right
to left, but neither could make out Il
syllable Jules Janin would rather re-
write than attempt to read over again
what he had written, and Montaigne
could never read what he had written
The acute thinker mended matters by
employing sccterary whose writing
was ais .utely undecipherablc. Bal
zac was as big a sinner, and Dickens
microscopic characters, written on blue
paper with blue ink, appellcd many
seasoned composi.ors. a terrible hard
had Henry Ward Beecher His
daughter once dclared that she had
three guiding rules in copying it: If
Il letter was DATED it was not an Il"
and if it was crossed it was not ct,
and word with Il capital letter did
not begin sentence. Jacob Bryan
said of Archdeacon CoXe's caligraphy
that ii could neither be called hand
nor a fist, but Il foot, and that club
one. His heiroglyphics formed clumsy
tangled black skein that ran across the
paper i'll knots, which it was impossible
to Unite into Il meaning. Lord Eldon
used to tell of John Bell, Il great chan
Gerry luminary Of his time, that he had
three different methods of putting his
wisdom on papcr-onc Ineligible to
himself only, another which his clerk
nor any one else coull read. The funny
letter Of 7. b. Aldrch to Professor
Morse stands alongside of Tom Hoods
f;lcctious reply to Lady Georgianna
Fullerton rs protest against learned
illcyihiiity. Aldrich asserted that he
could deeper nothing in the professors
mssivc nature. which he guessed at.
The story of the Duke Wellington
writing to Bishop Bloomfield when he
had received letter from j. c. Loudon,
the e;n:n mt landscape desi 5ncr. asked
to see the Waterloo beeches at Strath-
tiellsayc, is Il chestnut, but it makes
us laugh (although, perhaps, we ought
not to picture the CONSERVATION of the
bishop (and through him the shock to
the whole Episcopal benchl on receiv-
ing permission to view the Dukes
Waterloo benches Also a classic is
the tale Of Marcready's admission
ticket being solemnly made up by the
apnthccary int" n cough mixture. ''To