498 The Perils of Penmanship. t^Nov. 



man, that, hang it ! I had not the cruelty or the courage to undeceive him. 

 It would have been too ridiculous to have laid the mistake on a hand- 

 writing, which Providence, for inscrutable purposes, always chose to 

 make say one thing, when I meant another. I therefore submitted with 

 a good grace, married my fair correspondent, and limited my remon- 

 strance to a modest request, made a few days after our wedding, to be 

 allowed to see the precious manuscript which had brought us together. 

 It was burned. " I would have preserved the dear relic in cotton and 

 roses," said my bride ; " but it was such a scrawl, that I could not read 

 one word of it." — " Alay I then ask," cried I, " how you knew that it 

 was a proposal of marriage ?" — " Heavens, John ! how can you ask 

 that ? What else could it be, dear ?" 



After all, I never had reason to regret this chance-medley. My wife 

 is a sensible, agreeable, good-tempered woman — and our sole matrimo- 

 nial disaster is that we cannot read each other's letters. I confess it, to 

 my shame, that when I became a married man I grew utterly regardless 

 of my graphic improvement, and my printing-press was never bouglit. 

 I fancied that there would be small necessity for written communications 

 between my wife and me ; and, besides, scrawl as he will, I imagined 

 that a woman had some natural instinct bestowed on her for the purpose 

 of making out her husband's writing. I do not know which of us 

 wrote the most illegibly : — mine is a sort of straggling hiatus-looking 

 scrawl, right up and down, with a flourish at intervals by way of 

 emphasis :■ — My wife skims over the paper, for the most part, in a mean- 

 dering zig-zag, which disdains stops and paragraphs, with the additional 

 advantage of a word being now and then dashed under — and that, of 

 course, the most really unreadable word of the whole sentence. 



What is it that I have said ? — A woman can always make out her 

 husband's writing ! Fond delusion ! fatal mistake ! I have a hundred 

 examples to the contrary : but two or three, I doubt not, will suffice as 

 scarecrows. I presented her with a copy of verses on the anniversary of 

 our marriage ; and if I may be allowed to say as much, in my own be- 

 half, there were some peculiarly interesting lines amongst them : but 

 just as I fancied her fond look was melting over their tenderness, she 

 threw them with the air of a tragedy-queen into the fire, and burst into 

 a Belvidera-ish flood of tears : — I never could learn why. I was only 

 told that " I was a barbarous wretch," and that " I wanted to sacrifice 

 her — a victim to my cold-blooded philosophy :" and this, too, though I 

 did all in my power to induce her to believe in the authenticity of a 

 copy I possessed, written in a neat round-text hand (the spelling, to be 

 sure, a little incorrect) by my valet. I once wrote from the shooting- 

 lodge of Lord B for a fresh supply of gunpowder, and by the next 



coach received half a dozen tooth-brushes, a pound of prepared char- 

 coal, and six wash-balls. On another occasion, she was away on a visit, 

 and having overstayed her appointed time, I wrote her a letter full of 

 tender remonstrance ; by a customary fatuity she contrived, in her read- 

 ing of it, to heighten the remonstrance and sink the tenderness, so that 

 her answer, which was unusually hieroglyphical, flashed indignation 

 and reproach from one end of the crowded paper to the other ; at least to 

 the best of my conscience and belief it did : — but there was a postscript, 

 and as I have often heard, and even believed, that a lady's P. S. is 

 the gist of her correspondence, I dedicated four hours and a half con- 

 secutively to the most serious study of it ; after which I rose from my 



