We must, therefore, assume that it is as indispensable to write well as to do any other thing well. This idea was believed and practised upon until within twenty-five or thirty years ago. When what is called the "double-headed system" was universally prevalent in the public schools of the then town of Boston, the writing-master was appointed on account of his supposed dexterity in the teaching of penmanship, and no one was chosen, either master or assistant, who was not himself a good penman. And what was the consequence? The pupils of these schools became distinguished for the beauty of their chirography. They needed no better recommendation to the favor of merchants in distant cities, than to have been educated at one of them. It is true, the range of their attainments was not extensive; but what they professed to do they did well; and when they left school for the counting-room, they were prepared to enter upon the first steps of a business life, to the satisfaction of their employers, and with a rational prospect of personal success.

It must be acknowledged that this preparation was obtained at too great a cost of time and labor to the teacher, and that more occupation should have been furnished to the pupil; but let it be remembered that this was before the introduction of metallic pens into the schools, when two personsthe master and the usher were obliged to make and mend a thousand quill pens a day in a single school; which service occupied so considerable a portion of the time as to leave but little, comparatively, for other duties. Besides, there were two large apartments in each building, one of which was devoted to instruction in Reading, Grammar, Geography, and (occasionally) Composition; and the other to Writing and Arithmetic, a portion of the scholars attending one department in the forenoon, and the other in the afternoon alternating between the two. But, if the very most was not made of the hours in school for the benefit of the children, a greater evil was avoided — that of an excess of lessons for study, not only in the school halls, but at the fireside at home. This evil practice has, of late, attained such a point as to threaten the health and life of the children, and to entail upon the community a race of enfeebled beings, crushed or enervated in body, by overloading and overworking the mind, while little or no physical relaxation or exercise is allowed, to neutralize the effect of the unnatural process.

In some respects the system of these schools has been improved; and most of the large towns and cities in Massachusetts have followed, or are following, the lead of the metropolis. It is well to have one head, and make him responsible for the condition of all the

departments; but where this last thing is not done, where the several teachers of a large school act independently of the principal teacher, - the arrangement may prove to be a retrograde step; and this, in fact, I apprehend to be the condition of some of the schools about us and elsewhere.

But, on the particular topic under consideration, the value of penmanship, and its present deterioration, I have some additional remarks to make, and some views to offer, corroborative of my own, from other quarters.

EDWARD EVERETT is indebted to the public schools of Boston for his early education. His handwriting is not only perfectly legible, but neat and handsome. In one of his recent speeches, at a schoolgathering in the city, he says, alluding to the subject of writing, as taught in the days of his boyhood, "that beautiful old Boston handwriting, which, if I do not mistake, has, in the march of innovation (which is not always the same thing as improvement), been changed very little for the better." And this sentiment, divested of the Governor's courteous manner, means, I presume, "has been changed" very much for the worse.

HENRY WILLIAMS (late junior), for seventeen years principal of the Winthrop School in Boston, and second to no one of the public teachers in the beauty of his penmanship, acquired under the instruction of BENJAMIN HOLT, formerly of the Mayhew School,— says, in an article on Writing, in the Massachusetts Teacher for Nov., 1855: "Writing is an imitative art, which requires a careful and exact training. The eye and the hand, the taste and the judg ment, are constantly employed in producing the desired result, until the hand has attained a cunning which enables it to execute, almost mechanically, every required movement. We mean that volition becomes so rapid, that execution seems, after long practice, to be but the habit of the hand; illustrated thus by Pope:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance ;'

affixing to writing' the technical meaning which is often assigned to it. This art is partly mechanical and partly a mental operation. At first the mental operation needs as much to be watched over and aided as the mechanical operation of the hand; indeed, much more. You give a child a letter to imitate. What is the process which the task involves? He observes the character, but not with the practised eye, the taste and judgment of a penman. He then attempts to put

into form and outline his own idea of the letter. The result is a feeble abortion. He tries again and again. His teacher will tell him, we think, if he is judicious, to do it slowly, until he is quite successful. Those who have had much experience in teaching young children, will credit the assertion, that it will generally require two or three years' training before the fifty-two characters of the large and small alphabets are mastered. Hurrying only retards the child's progress. After he has learned, by long and careful painstaking, to imitate these forms, he then learns to combine them; to exercise his judgment in spacing the characters; to discern the fitness of their relative lengths and proportions; and to preserve carefully an exact parallelism in their formation."

The following article, from a late Boston paper, I know not what one, is evidently the work of an individual well acquainted with his subject, as far as Writing is concerned, although I dissent from his views of what is doing in Arithmetic, believing that that subject receives at least as much attention in the schools as it can fairly claim; and I gladly avail myself of his testimony to strengthen my position:

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"PENMANSHIP. Within the present generation there has been more deterioration in penmanship than in any other branch of education. In days of yore a good, round, legible handwriting was considered indispensable to our youth; and our fathers, if they could get no more of an education, were pretty sure to understand Arithmetic as far as the Rule of Three, and to write a good hand. And we are heterodoxical enough to believe that for the practical purposes of business, that education, limited as it was, is preferable to the cramming which boys undergo now-a-days, to the neglect of chirography, and the simple rules of Arithmetic.

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Why are the writers of the present day less rapid and less legible, chirographically, than they were fifty or even twenty years ago? We answer, first, because they are not properly taught. A writing-master in the olden time always insisted upon three points-first, that the pupil should commence with, and be drilled upon, large letters, until he knew how to shape them regularly and well; secondly, that there should be a rotundity to all the letters which admit of it; and, thirdly, that the pupil, in school, should always write slowly.*

* The third point was a school axiom fifty years ago, and was embodied in the distich,

"Learn to write slow; all other graces

Will follow in their proper places." -T.

Now mark the consequence of such teaching. The pupil made straight marks until he could make really straight ones, and write them parallel to each other. Then he was advanced to curve letters, and finally to those letters combined of straight lines and curves. He was required to consume an hour in writing his copy of twelve lines, or one line in five minutes. By this slowness his eye became accustomed to form. After writing single letters, he was taught to write words, and then sentences, and for the first year or two he was kept exclusively upon what the schoolmasters call large hand. Then he was allowed to write copies of a medium hand, and finally of fine hand.

"No flourishing was then allowed upon copy-books. Boys were not taught to draw ornithological specimens with the pen, nor to use the pen for any other than its proper purpose. They, therefore, came from school legible penmen. Of course the reader will ask what is the cause of more illegibility in penmanship now? propose to

answer.

"Some ten or fifteen years ago a new race of writing-masters appeared on the stage, who proposed to make their pupils exchange a very bad for a very good style of writing in from ten to twenty lessons. They called their systems by inappropriate names, such as 'anti-angular,' and the like. For a time they claimed to be, and on the surface appeared to be, successful. Their systems, mainly professing to be anti-angular, were peculiarly a combination of straight marks and very acute angles, so as to destroy the proper rotundity of the letters. An incautious observer, from the pains that they took to make their pupils observe size in the formation of the letters, would say that their handwriting looked better after the twenty lessons than before; but, if he would attempt to read it, he would find the new hand more illegible than the old.

"Multitudes were duped in this manner, and, having expended their money and their time, soon after relapsed into the old hand which they had previously acquired, and such did not again trouble the writing-masters who teach in a very few lessons. That experience taught the people, what they ought to have discovered by a little reflection, that chirography is a mechanical art, and needs longcontinued practice to make its subject a good penman. To make a bad penman into a good one, in from ten to twenty, or even in a hundred lessons, is precisely similar to giving a boy a skilful use of the plane in just so many hours. Nay, worse than that; for the plane can be skilfully managed by an eye competent to judge of smoothness alone; but the penman must appreciate size, form, regularity,

and beauty. Unless he does all this, his penmanship will be poor; and he must not only appreciate these qualities, but be able to execute them in his copy. Talk of imparting this in twenty lessons! The proposition is simply absurd. If he has a correct taste and a fancy for chirography, he will get a good handwriting by years of attention, and then he may write fast without writing illegibly. There is no shorter road to good penmanship, maugre the pretensions of quacks and sciolists."

Another reason for the falling off in the quality of the writing of the present day is, I apprehend, a low estimate of its value in the minds of those who appoint the teachers.* If the candidate is found to be what is called a "good scholar," deficiency in penmanship is hardly considered a bar to his election; although to write well is as essential a qualification in a good teacher of a common school, as proficiency in any one of the studies embraced in the school course. There should be an acknowledged standard by which to determine merit in this important branch of learning. The spirits of the past renowned penmen of England and our own country should be evoked, -Champion, Milne, Tileston, Carter, Fox, the Webbs, Holt, and others, possessed like them of undisputed skill in teaching and executing good writing. If candidates for places could make no approach to a good degree of skill like theirs, they should not be chosen. Let the voice of the community resolutely demand this, and it would be forthcoming. It is attainable by most of those who wish. to become teachers, on the condition of determined resolution and perseverance; and they who are unable or unwilling thus to secure it, would do well to adopt some other sphere of labor.

In pointing out the details in the method of teaching penmanship, I should accept most of the sentiments and suggestions quoted above from the Boston newspaper, not only for their being time-honored, but because they are consonant with methods that have been found

* It is possible that our fathers exaggerated the worth of good writing; but the effect of their estimate of it on the young was highly beneficial. It excited their enthusiasm and their most earnest efforts, while they wrote, as one of their “pieces" for "Selectmen-day," in a style of perfect beauty :

"Three things bear mighty sway with men :

The Sword, the Sceptre, and the Pen;
Who can the least of these command,

In the first rank of Fame shall stand!"

A revival of a portion of this spirit would be a decided improvement on the now prevalent apathy on the subject.