EVIDENCE FROM HANDWRITING.
THE Quarterly asserts that Mr. Twisleton in his forthcoming book on Junius has placed the authorship of the celebrated Letters beyond controversy, and we agree with the Quarterly. At least, we cannot imagine circumstantial evidence on behalf of any proposition more absolutely unanswerable. If Sir Philip Francis and Junius were not identical, then it is possible for two persona not only to have precisely the same tricks of handwriting, and the same individualities of punctuation, and to preserve them through reams of manuscript, but to be able without knowing it in all moments of forgetfulness to write different hands, each of which shall be the hand of the other. Most of our readers are probably familiar with Macaulay's celebrated summary of the evidence which iden- tifies Sir Philip Francis with the invisible author of Junius, the coincidences of peculiar knowledge, personal history, likes and dislikes, and political opinions between the two personages ; but Mr. Twisleton has employed a new test, the evidence of an expert in handwriting, Mr. Chabot, who, in an elaborate report, carefully though succinctly summarized by the reviewer, not only affirms his own belief that the letters of Sir Philip Francis and the letters of Junius were written by the same hand, but gives reasons for the belief which even in their summarized form seem to us to force conviction. For example, it is clear that in comparing a disguised with an avowed handwriting, the first things to be con- sidered are those unconscious peculiarities of which the writer himself is unaware, and which therefore he would make no effort to conceal. He would, for instance, carefully alter the slope of his usual handwriting, but would do this mainly in the down. strokes, the upstrokes being made by a movement almost instinc- tive. He would alter the size of his handwriting, a change which takes in all but careful observers, while he would retain one of the most marked of individual peculiarities, what printers call the " spacing," the distance between each letter of a word. The difference between huddling and spacing out is one which depends partly on character and partly on eyesight, and is as a rule entirely uncon- scious, very few men, perhaps none, spacing out their letters exactly alike or connecting them with each other in the same way. Again, some men make the upper turns of the letters angular while the lower are rounded, others the lower turns angular while the upper are rounded, and others make both either round or angular, but few writers not practised in comparing handwritings would be conscious which method they themselves pursued. In each of these three unconscious peculiarities Junius and Sir P. Francis were precisely alike, more alike than any two for- gers imitating Sir P. Francis could have been. This habit of speciality, of course, extends to individual letters, methods of punctuation, and modes of correcting mistakes, the latter, we may observe, with our large experience in the reading of manuscript, being one of the most strongly marked of individualisms. In all these circumstances Junius and Sir Philip Francis had exactly the same habits. For example, Francis frequently wrote the letter " i " upside down, as if it were the first stroke of the letter "m," a very unusual speciality of handwriting, and it reappears in the most striking way in his artificial hand. So does a singular trick of making a flourish above a small "t," which almost changes it into a capital letter, and a still more definite speciality, a habit whenever the letter " m " was joined to the word preceding it of altering its appearance. Both Francis and Junius wrote the " m " by itself with rounded curves, and both when they prefixed a letter and joined the " m " on made the carves sharply angular, a- coincidence explicable only on the theory of identity. So with punctuation. No two people, it may be
said roughly, punctuate on the same principle, more especially if they employ, an most people who write hurriedly do, the dash instead of a period ; and not only is the punctuation of Junius and Francis identical, but they both put a full stop after a salutation, and both make the note of interrogation with three strokes instead of, as is most usual, with two. Both, too, corrected within the line instead of above or below it, and both marked the initial of their signature with strokes above and below the letter. This last fact is the more noteworthy, because Francis did not make these strokes in his original hand, but adopted them to help in disguising his hand, and caught the habit while composing the Junian letters. There are, in fact, no less than ten circum- stances of identity between the two handwritings :—" 1. The mode of dating letters. 2. The placing of a full-stop after the salutation. 3. The mode of signing initials between two dashes. 4. Writing in paragraphs. 5. Separating paricgraphs by dashes placed between them at their commencement. 6. Invariable attention to punctuation. 7. The enlargement of the first letters of words. 8. The insertion of omitted letters in the line of writing, and not above it, and the various modes of correcting miswriting. 9. Mode of abbreviating words, and abbreviat- ing the same words. 10. Misspelling certain specified words." And finally it would be presumed that any person intent on disguising his hand would forget himself most frequently in dating his letters, and all the peculiarities of Junius's datings, as, for instance, his habit of putting a full-stop after the name of the place, are found in Francis's letters, while all the "dates were not inserted in the manuscripts as sent to the printer, but were added in the proof-sheets. It would seem that Francis, being more off his guard in correcting the proofs than in writing the letters, inadvertently inserted the dates in his natural handwrit- ing; but, upon discovering the mistake he had committed, he carefully blotted out these dates, and rewrote them above the obliterations in his feigned hand. On examining the photographed proof-sheets, we find that all the original dates have been obliterated and written in the feigned hand, except in one instance, namely, in the letter to Dr. William Blackstone, where Francis forgot to make the obliteration, and has left the date [29. July. 1769.] in his own handwriting." It seems to us, as to the reviewer, that after this evidence, which would be indefinitely more striking if we could give the facsimiles as he has aone, doubt is impossible, except upon the theory that Francis copied somebody else's letters. That theory, however, is disposed of by the excessive effort made to secure secrecy, for which Francis as a mere amanuensis had little motive ; by the character of Francis, who was no man to be an amanuensis ; and by another argument which we submit respectfully to the reviewer. The most com- plete and most natural method of disguising the handwriting of important documents is to write with the left hand. An amanu- ensis would almost to a certainty have done this, but no man try- ing to write models of composition, trying to win the public ear by the form as well as the substance of his letters, would so embar- rass his thoughts by reducing the speed at which they could be put on paper. Re would content himself with writing a hand as unlike his own in general appearance as he could manage, would in particular adopt a much smaller hand, using a crow-quill, and this is precisely what Francis appears to have done.
We do trust that Mr. Chabot will one day give us, perhaps through the Quarterly, an essay explaining any view he may have as to the evidence of character contained in handwriting. No idea is more firmly fixed in men's minds than the charac- teristicalness of handwritings, and none perhaps is so little based upon any well-conceived law. We do not know, for instance, with any certainty whether the key to handwriting is to be found in the intellect, in the moral nature, or in physical peculiarities, as, for example, eyesight, or in all of them,—whether handwriting can be inherited without the accompanying qualities, as many habits are inherited, or how far handwriting is modified by deliberate volition. Is it mere impatience, or is it moral deficiency, which induces some men never to dot an i or cross a t, or is it largeness of intellect, satisfied that the object of writing is intelligibility and not apparent neatness? What is it that induces educated people to omit all stops in their letters ? Is it cruelty, or contempt for things so ignoble as grammar, or mere mental crassitude, and above all, what is the moral meaning of illegible writing? We will, in the name of all:editors in England, promise Mr. Chabot such a testimonial, if he will only prove to demon- stration that a man who, writing much, writes a really illegible hand is a selfish fool, a potential criminal, who should be executed for the benefit of society, and whoseletters, till he is hung, it is a moral duty to throw away unread.
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