Fear not to sprinkle on the pyre The woes of " Esther Waters "; They 'll only make the flames burn higher And warn Eve's other daughters.
Beware of Howells and of James, O Trollope and his rout; The first would dampen down your flames, The other put them out! "Book-News " recently gave an entertaining chap ter on Law-Book Dedications. The Easy Chair has dedicated a little manual, just published, to the afore said Omar, using of the foregoing stanzas the first, third, seventh, and eighth, and adding : — "And spare, oh spare this suppliant book Against a time of need; Hide it away in humble nook To serve for legal seed. "The man who writes but hundred pages Where thousands went before, Deserves the thanks of weary sages, And Omar should adore."
Handwriting. — Every legal practitioner has had occasion to admire or to deprecate the subtlety of ex perts in handwriting as witnesses. There is no wit ness wiser in his own conceit, who knows more with out being able to give an intelligible reason for it, or who is more liable to be wrong. Experts are the bane of courts of justice, and experts in handwriting are in the front rank of these undesirable and opin ionated witnesses. But there is one class of these experts even more fallible than those who go upon the witness-stand. These are the wiseacres who profess to read a man's character from his handwrit ing. A striking exemplar of this class seems to be J. Holt Schooling, who writes for the " Strand Maga zine," taking well known and celebrated men, setting forth their handwriting, and then gravely showing how their characters may be predicated from their handwriting. He may be described as a prophet who foretells past events. His last effort in this di rection is an article on the portraits and handwriting of Napoleon. One naturally inquires, if the charac ter is determinable from the handwriting, what is the use of the portraits? It seems that physiognomy is a useful crutch for handwriting. Mr. Schooling also goes considerably into Napoleon's history. So having shown from the facts of his life and the lineaments of his face what a bad and dangerous character he was, he is prepared to disclose his traits from a study of his handwriting! His view of Napoleon's character is such as might have been expected from an English
Tory of the year 1820, and quite suited to a man who should now inhabit a little island all of his own. His opinion of Napoleon's face is found in the following : "Indeed, all the portraits which may be considered likenesses suggest a powerful and dangerous member of the actively aggressive criminal class, whom one would probably fight shy of if it were possible to meet him nowadays as one's vis-a-vis inside a London omnibus." This of a man celebrated for the classic perfection and beauty of his countenance, shown to special advantage by a reproduction in this very arti cle of the English Captain Marryat's sketch of him as he lay dead! Not one of the pictures selected by this writer but contradicts his assertions. Having thus laid the foundation for his deductions, he pro ceeds to trace Napoleon's character and career from his handwriting, or his " pen-gesture," as he calls it in the cant of his profession. He has hardly any thing but Napoleon's name, in full or abbreviated, or his initial, to show, but this is all-sufficient. When Napoleon is depressed or despondent, it " droops; when he is triumphant, it " mounts; " — /'. e., slants down or up. When he is in a great hurry, or as the professor calls it, abnormally "active," he abbre viates, and when he is at his very worst of tyranny and vindictiveness and triumph, he fairly "stabs" the paper with a " terrific N." As the astute pro fessor stultifies his theories of physiognomy with his portraits, so also he destroys his theory of handwrit ing by his faesimiles; for the very best and most legible of all are those to the immortal letter of sur render to ihe Prince Regent, the first one at St. Helena in 18 16, and that to his will, accompanied by the concluding sentence of that document! The radical trouble with all these wise penmen is that they would test a man's character by his hand as if he always wrote with the same pen and ink, on the same paper, at the same age, in the same health, and in the same circumstances, sitting for a pen-portrait, as it were. Probably every man who reads these lines has seen his own signature — made years before, which he could scarcely recognize; as for example, on a hotel register, his hand tired with lugging his bag, the pen strange, the ink thick, the elevation of the desk inconvenient. Many a man might be sadly misjudged by such a signature. So when Mr. School ing finds "rage and fury" in the "N" just after Leipsic, he ought to find it in the " N " just after the capture of Paris, but it is singularly calm. No one, however, will gainsay " the most salient quality of Napoleon's handwriting," according to Mr. School ing —-"activity." Napoleon wrote a very "active hand " — it looks frequently as if scrawled by an active spider. Poe, in his writings on autography, says of the manuscript of David Paul Browne : " His chirography has no doubt been strongly modified by
