It has been said that the introduction of cheap postage, and the immense increase of everyday correspondence, has ruined handwriting, while the typewriter is quickly becoming universal, and banished for ever the art of composition. True, the short letters of to-day will not bear comparison with the neat, voluminous diary-letters, full of graphic scenic descriptions, which our grandparents were wont to compile for the benefit of relations left at home; now, when similar correspondence is undertaken, it is copied out by the typewriter or printed, for few people will take the trouble to read manuscript compositions. Looking beyond the opening years of the nineteenth century, we see a marked paucity of ideas and carelessness of calligraphy in the correspondence. In the seventeenth century men were the chief correspondents on matters of business; few letters are preserved except on such topics, which is a pity, for a letter must always be a unique production, the best evidence procurable of the writer and his times. There is little to be said on the subject of old letters. Practice in reading them makes the lettering familiar, and gives facility which no guidebook could explain; letters, both ancient and modern, will assume a new interest when the little trifling, characteristic peculiarities of the writer are examined by their aid. Old receipts, expense-books, and farm accounts are found in plenty among old papers. These are valuable as giving long-lost field-names and other details of parochial history; but what we should prize now would be descriptions of people and places as they existed some hundreds of years ago. [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. ABBREVIATIONS, ETC. In most books treating of ancient handwriting, the abbreviations and contractions are put forward as the most important part; certainly it is necessary to study them carefully, but it was never intended by the old scribes that they should be regarded as a language in themselves. At first they were used to save time and space, then, by degrees, they increased in multiplicity as well as complexity, till banished altogether by the invention of printing, upon the advance of which the professional scribe disappeared.