From my pile of Statesmen's autographs I extract yet another, and I lay it side by side with the autographs of a great author and a great ecclesiastic. All three are very small, exquisitely neat, very little slanted, absolutely legible. Well as I knew the three writers, I doubt if I could tell which wrote which letter. They were Cardinal Manning, Mr. Froude, and Lord Rosebery. Will the experts in caligraphy tell me if, in this case, similarity of writing bodied forth similarity of gifts or qualities? Another very close similarity may be observed between the writing of Lord Halsbury and that of Lord Brampton (better known as Sir Henry Hawkins), which, but for the fact that Lord Brampton uses the long "s" and Lord Halsbury does not, are pretty nearly identical. If there is one truth which can be deduced more confidently than another from my collection of autographs, it is that there is no such thing as "the literary hand." Every variety of writing which a "Reader's" fevered brain could conceive is illustrated in my bundle of literary autographs. _Seniores priores._ Samuel Rogers was born in 1763, and died in 1855. A note of his, written in 1849, and beginning, "Pray, pray, come on Tuesday," is by far the most surprising piece of caligraphy in my collection. It is so small that, except under the eyes of early youth, it requires a magnifying-glass; yet the symmetry of every letter is perfect, and, when sufficiently enlarged, it might stand as a model of beautiful and readable writing. I take a bound of sixty years, and find some of the same characteristics reproduced by my friend Mr. Quiller-Couch; but between the "Pleasures of Memory" and "Green Bays" there rolls a sea of literature, and it has been navigated by some strange crafts in the way of handwriting. I have spoken on another occasion of Dean Stanley, Lord Houghton, and James Payn; specimens of their enormities surround me as I write, and I can adduce, I think, an equally heinous instance. Here is Sydney Smith, writing in 1837 to "Dear John," the hero of the Reform Act, "No body wishes better for you and yours than the inhabitants of Combe Florey." Perhaps so; but they conveyed their benedictions through a very irritating medium, for Sydney Smith's writing is of the immoral type, pleasing to the eye and superficially legible, but, when once you have lost the clue, a labyrinth. Perhaps it is due to this circumstance that his books abound, beyond all others, in uncorrected misprints.