Why did very old people write so well? I have already described the writing of Samuel Rogers, of the Waterloo Lord Albemarle, and of Sir Theodore Martin. Pretty well for octogenarian penmanship; but I can enlarge the gallery. A bundle of octogenarian letters lies before me as I write. Oliver Wendell Holmes sends a tribute to Matthew Arnold. Charles Villiers accepts an invitation to dinner. Lord Norton invites me to stay at Hams. Archdeacon Denison complains of "his first attack of gout at eighty-five." Mr. Leveson-Gower at eighty-six thanks me for a review of his first book. I protest that there is not an ungraceful line--scarcely a misshaped letter--in any of these five manuscripts. Here is a small, elegant, and "taily" hand, rather like an old-fashioned lady's. The signature is "Yours sincerely, EVERSLEY," better known as Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, the most authoritative Speaker the House of Commons ever had. Note that this was written in his eighty-eighth year, and he lived to buy a new pair of guns after he was ninety. Here is a strong, clear, well-defined writing, setting forth with precision and emphasis the reasons why the last Duke of Cleveland, then in his eighty-fifth year, will not give more than £5 for an object which he has been asked to help. The writing of the beloved and honoured Duke of Rutland, always graceful and regular, becomes markedly smaller, though not the least less legible, till he dies at eighty-seven. There is no more vigorous, even dashing, signature in my store than "G. J. Holyoake," written in July 1905. Close to the imperial purple of the Agitator's ink nestles, in piquant contrast, a small half-sheet of rose-pink paper bearing a Duchess's coronet and cypher. The writing is distinct and ornamental; the letter was written in 1880, and the writer was born in 1792. But the mere fact of attaining to eighty or ninety years will not absolutely guarantee, though it seems to promote, legibility of writing. My venerable friend Dean Randall, who was born in 1824, ends a letter, which certainly needs some such apology, with a disarming allusion to the "dreadful scrawl" of his "ancient MS."; and four sides of tantalizing hieroglyphics, drawn apparently with a blunt stick, are shown by external evidence to be a letter from Canon Carter of Clewer when he had touched his ninetieth birthday. On similarity, approaching to identity, between the writings of very dissimilar persons I have already remarked, and a further illustration comes to light as I turn over my papers. Here are two letters in the graceful and legible script of the early nineteenth century, with long S's, and capitals for all the substantives. Both are evidently the handiwork of cultivated gentlemen; and both the writers, as a matter of fact, were clergymen. But there the resemblance stops. The one was "Jack" Russell, the well-known Sporting Parson of Exmoor; the other was Andrew Jukes, the deepest and most influential Mystic whom the latter-day Church has seen.