43.
How to vary each of these, so that ten thousand may know them, and yet[6] keep the understanding part from any but their Correspondent.
Footnote
[6]yet—omitted.
[A variation of all and each of these.] We have here ten Alphabets, concluding with a variation on each, which, had it been given, would have at least increased the number to twenty, but that was by no means the limit. Cipher Alphabets are the least interesting portion of the “Century;” we imagine we trace in them some of the Marquis’s earliest studies, and fancy that later in life they were retained from fond recollections of the past.
These secret methods of corresponding are no longer of any service, and have no interest beyond what may attach to them in connection with the history of short-hand writing, wherein the object is rather dispatch than secrecy. Among early writers on the art of Senigraphy, and Stenography, are Bright, 1588, Bales 1590, Arnold Bostius, Trithemius 1600, Willis 1618, Dix 1633, Wilkins 1641, Cartwright 1652, Rich 1654, Falconer (“The Art of Secret Information,”) 1685, with others.
John Baptista Porta, a Neapolitan of considerable eminence, born 1445, and who died in 1515, wrote “De Occultis Literarium Notis, Libri quinque,” Argent. 1608, octavo, in which he gives no less than 180 different methods of secret writing.
The learned and ingenious Bishop Wilkins in 1641, published his “Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger.”
Of line alphabets he says—“Who would mistrust any private news or treachery to lie hid in a thread, wherein there was nothing to be discerned, but sundry confused knots or other the like marks?” It is, however, easily effected by each party having like tablets marked at top with the alphabet, and having hooks down each side for the passing and holding of a thread worked backwards and forwards, in which action it is to have a knot made on it for the desired letter above; making altogether words and sentences.
Chapter 6, is on “Secret writing with the common letters, by changing of their places.”