characteristic: they are purely _generic_ hands, and therefore want _individualisation_: they are abstractions; but to affect us pleasurably, they should be concrete expressions of some human qualities, moral or intellectual. Perfect features in a human face arranged with perfect symmetry, affect us not at all, as is well known, where there is nothing characteristic; the latency of the individual in the generic, and of the generic in the individual, is that which gives to each its power over our human sensibilities. And this holds of caligraphy no less than other arts. And _that_ is the most perfect hand-writing which unites the _minimum_ of deviation from the ideal standard of beauty (as to the form and nexus of the letters) with the _maximum_ of characteristic expression. It has long been practically felt, and even expressly affirmed (in some instances even expanded into a distinct art and professed as such), that it is possible to determine the human _intellectual_ character as to some of its features from the hand-writing. Books even have been written on this art, as _e. g._ the _Ideographia_, or art of knowing the characters of men from their hand-writings, by _Aldorisius_: and, though this in common with all other modes of _physiognomy_, as craniology, Lavaterianism (usually called physiognomy), &c. &c. has laboured under the reproach of fancifulness,--yet we ought not to attribute this wholly to the groundlessness of the art as a possible art--but to these two causes; partly to the precipitation and imperfect psychology of the professors; who, like the craniologists, have been over-ready to determine the _indicantia_ before they had settled according to any tolerable theory the _indicanda_; _i. e._ have settled what A, what B, what C, shall _indicate_, before they have inquired what it was presumable upon any systematic development of human nature would have a right _to be indicated_; and thus have assigned an external characteristic to a faculty of the third order--suppose (or perhaps a mere accidental effect of a faculty or a mere imaginary faculty), whilst a primary faculty went without any expression at all:--partly, I say, to this cause which is obviously not merely a subjective but also an accidental cause; and partly also to the following cause, which is objective (_i. e._ seated in the inherent imperfections of the art itself, and not removeable therefore by any future improvements to be anticipated from a more matured psychology); viz. that the human mind transcends or overflows the gamut or scale of the art; in other words, that the qualities--intellectual or moral, which ought to be expressed, are far more in number than the alphabet of signs or expressions by which they are to be enunciated. Hence it follows as an inevitable dilemma, that many qualities must go unrepresented; or else be represented by signs common to them with other qualities: in the first of which cases we have an art imperfect from