It is remarkable that legibility of handwriting should never have been considered as among the essentials of courtesy in correspondence. It is obviously for the convenience of the reader that a letter should be easily read; but here another consideration intervenes. To write very legibly is the accomplishment of clerks and writing-masters, who are usually poor men, and, as such, do not hold a high social position. Aristocratic pride has always had it for a principle to disdain, for itself, the accomplishments of professional men; and therefore a careless scrawl is more aristocratic than a clean handwriting, if the scrawl is of a fashionable kind. Perhaps the historic origin of this feeling may be the scorn of the ignorant mediæval baron for writing of all kinds as beneath the attention of a warrior. In a cultured age there may be a reason of a higher order. It may be supposed that attention to mechanical excellence is incompatible with the action of the intellect; and people are curiously ready to imagine incompatibilities where they do not really exist. As a matter of fact, some men of eminent intellectual gifts write with as exquisite a clearness in the formation of their letters as in the elucidation of their ideas. It is easily forgotten, too, that the same person may use different kinds of handwriting, according to circumstances, like the gentleman whose best hand some people could read, whose middling hand the writer himself could read, and whose worst neither he nor any other human being could decipher. Legouvé, in his exquisite way, tells a charming story of how he astonished a little girl by excelling her in calligraphy. His scribble is all but illegible, and she was laughing at it one day, when he boldly challenged her to a trial. Both sat down and formed their letters with great patience, as in a writing class, and it turned out, to the girl's amazement, that the scribbling Academician had by far the more copperplate-like hand of the two. He then explained that his bad writing was simply the result of speed. Frenchmen provokingly reserve their very worst and most illegible writing for the signature. You are able to read the letter but not the signature, and if there is not some other means of ascertaining the writer's name you are utterly at fault. The old habit of crossing letters, now happily abandoned, was a direct breach of real, though not of what in former days were conventional, good manners. To cross a letter is as much as to say, "In order to spare myself the cost of another sheet of paper or an extra stamp, I am quite willing to inflict upon you, my reader, the trouble of disengaging one set of lines from another." Very economical people in the past generation saved an occasional penny in another way at the cost of the reader's eyes. They diluted their ink with water, till the recipient of the letter cried, "Prithee, why so pale?"