The idea of stenography or shorthand writing originated in ancient times. Antiquarians have tried to show, with more or less plausibility, that it was practised more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ by the Persians, Egyptians, and Hebrews. Abbreviated writing, for taking down lectures and preserving poems recited at the Olympic and other games, was used by the Greeks. The first known practitioner of the art of shorthand writing was Tiro, who lived in Rome 63 B.C., and who was the stenographer of the great orator Cicero. He took down in shorthand the speeches of his master, by whom they were afterward revised. Plutarch says that when the Roman Senate was voting on the charge which Cicero had preferred against Catiline, Cicero distributed shorthand reporters throughout the Senate House for the purpose of taking down the speeches of some of the leading Senators. At the close of St. Paul's letter to the Colossians there is a note to the effect that the Epistle was written from Rome by Tychicus and Onesimus. It has been supposed that Tychicus acted as shorthand writer and Onesimus as transcriber. Certain it is that the early Christian fathers employed a system of shorthand writing. Saint Augustine refers to a church meeting held at Carthage in the fourth century of the Christian era, at which eight shorthand writers were employed, two working at a time. Charlemagne, the great king of the Franks, who died in 814 A.D., delved deep into the art of shorthand writing as practised by Tiro, Cicero's stenographer. In Chapter xxxviii of _David Copperfield_, Charles Dickens describes his own experience with shorthand thus: "I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence), and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place--not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant _expectation_, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for _disadvantageous_. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking."