Grace and legibility are the two chief glories of penmanship, but other attributes are not without their effect. A dashing scrawl, if only it is easy to read, suggests a soaring superiority to conventional restraints, and rather bespeaks a hero. Here are two scrawls, and each is the work of a remarkable person. One is signed "Yours truly, Jos. Cowen," and I dare say that some of my readers would see in it the index to a nature at once impetuous and imperious. But Mr. Cowen's scrawl was crowquill-work and copperplate compared with its next-door neighbour. "Accept the enclosed, dear Mr. Russell," covers the whole of one side of a sheet of letter-paper; the ink is blue; the paper is ribbed; the signature, all wreathed in gigantic flourishes and curling tails, is "Laura Thistlethwaite," and the enclosed is one of the Evangelistic Addresses of that gifted preacher who once was Laura Bell. Odd incongruities keep turning up. As I pass from the Evangelical lady-orator, I come to Father Ignatius, an Evangelical orator with a difference, but with a like tendency to scrawl. Lord Leighton's writing is also a scrawl, and, it must be confessed, an egotistical scrawl, and a very bad scrawl to read. An illegible scrawl, too, is the writing of Richard Holt Hutton, but his is not a vainglorious or commanding scrawl, but rather humble and untidy. "Henry Irving" is a signature quite culpably illegible, but "Squire Bancroft" is just irregular enough to be interesting though not unreadable. _Per contra_, I turn to one of the most legible signatures in my possession. The writing is ugly and the letters are ill-formed, looking rather like the work of a hand which has only lately learned to write and finds the act a difficulty. But it is as clear as print, and it shows no adventitious ornamentation or self-assertive twirls. The signature is "Yours most sincerely, RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL." In this case, if in no other, the oracles of Caligraphy are set at naught. Here is a fine, twisty, twirling hand, all tails and loops, but not at all unsightly. The signature reads like "Lincoln," and only a careful study would detect that the "L" of "Lincoln" is preceded by a circular flourish which looks like part of the L but is really a capital C. It is the signature of that great scholar, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln; and I remember that, in days of ecclesiastical strife, it was once imputed to that apostolic man for vanity that he signed his name "Lincoln" like a Temporal Peer. From that day he defined the "C" more carefully. To the last letter which I bring to light to-day a different kind of interest attaches. It is dated "DINGLE BANK, LIVERPOOL, _April 13, 1888_."