If Lord Palmerston stood easily first among the penmen of his time, the credit of writing the worst hand in England was divided among at least three claimants. First there was Lord Houghton, whose strange, tall, upright strokes, all exactly like each other except in so far as they leaned in different directions, Lord Tennyson likened to "walking-sticks gone mad." Then there was my dear friend Mr. James Payn, who described his own hand only too faithfully when he wrote about "the wandering of a centipede which had just escaped from the inkpot and had scrawled and sprawled over the paper," and whose closest friends always implored him to correspond by telegraph. And, finally, there was the "bad eminence" of Dean Stanley, whose lifelong indulgence in hieroglyphics inflicted a permanent loss on literature. The Dean, as all readers of his biography will remember, had a marked turn for light and graceful versification. The albums and letter-caskets of his innumerable friends were full of these "occasional" verses, in which domestic, political, and ecclesiastical events were prettily perpetuated. After his death his sister, Mrs. Vaughan, tried to collect these fugitive pieces in a Memorial Volume, but an unforeseen difficulty occurred. In many cases the recipients of the poems were dead and gone, and no living creature could decipher the Dean's writing. So what might have been a pretty and instructive volume perished untimely.
Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, the brilliant dame who raised the Gordon Highlanders and who played on the Tory side the part which the Duchess of Devonshire played among the Whigs, had, like our English Subalterns, a very imperfect education; but with great adroitness she covered her deficiences with a cloak of seeming humour. "Whenever," she wrote to Sir Walter Scott, "I come to a word which I cannot spell, I write it as near as I can, and put a note of exclamation after it; so that, if it's wrong, my friend will think that I was making a joke." A respected member of the present Cabinet who shares Duchess Jane's orthographical weakness covers his retreat by drawing a long, involuted line after the initial letter of each word. Let the reader write, say, the word "aluminium" on this principle; and he will see how very easily imperfect spelling in high places may be concealed.
With soldiers this chapter began, and with a soldier it shall end—the most illustrious of them all, Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Let it be recorded for the encouragement of our modern Subalterns that the Duke, though he spelled much better than Captain Crawley, wrote quite as badly as Sir George Tufto; but that circumstance did not—as is sometimes the case—enable him to interpret by sympathy the hieroglyphics of other people. Is there any one left, "In a Lancashire Garden" or elsewhere, who recalls the honoured name of Jane Loudon, authoress of "The Lady's Companion to her Flower Garden"? Mrs. Loudon was an accomplished lady, who wrote not only on Floriculture, but on Arboriculture and Landscape Gardening, and illustrated what she wrote. In one of her works she desired to insert a sketch of the "Waterloo Beeches" at Strathfieldsaye—a picturesque clump planted to commemorate our deliverance from the Corsican Tyrant. Accordingly she wrote to the Duke of Wellington, requesting leave to sketch the beeches, and signed herself, in her usual form, "J. Loudon." The Duke, who, in spite of extreme age and perceptions not quite so clear as they had once been, insisted on conducting all his own correspondence, replied as follows:—
"F.M. the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to the Bishop of London. The Bishop is quite at liberty to make a sketch of the breeches which the Duke wore at Waterloo, if they can be found. But the Duke is not aware that they differed in any way from the breeches which he generally wears."
XXXIV
AUTOGRAPHS
From handwriting in general to autographs in particular the transition is natural, almost inevitable. My recent reflections on the imperfect penmanship of the British officer sent me to my collection of letters, and the sight of these autographs—old friends long since hidden away—set me on an interesting enquiry. Was there any affinity between the writing and the character? Could one, in any case, have guessed who the writer was, or what he did, merely by scrutinizing his manuscript? I make no pretension to any skill in the art or science of Caligraphy; and, regarding my letters merely as an amateur or non-expert, I must confess that I arrive at a mixed and dubious result. Some of the autographs are characteristic enough; some seem to imply qualities for which the writer was not famed and to suppress others for which he was notorious.
Let us look carefully at the first letter which I produce from my hoard. The lines are level, and the words are clearly divided, although here and there an abbreviation tells that the hand which wrote this letter had many letters to write; the capitals, of which there are plenty, are long and twirling, though the intermediate letters are rather small, and the signature is followed by an emphatic dash which seems to say more explicitly than words that the writer is one who cannot be ignored. This is the autograph of Queen Victoria in those distant days when she said, "They seem to think that I am a schoolgirl, but I will teach them that I am Queen of England."