SHORT‘HANt). 
at the top with points ; others are the final 
letters of words ; and others, again, are 
contracted words, wherein two or three 
letters are made to denote an entire word. 
The Jews were particularly partial to these 
' methods of abbreviation, to which they 
added a few arbitrary characters to express 
certain proper names, such as God, Je- 
hovah, &c. 
This kind of writing was, by degrees, in- 
troduced, and successfully practised among 
the Greeks. Nicolai gives it as his opinion 
that Xenophon first taught the Greeks to 
write by certain notes, in the nature of cha- 
racters. Laertius confirms this opinion, 
and particularly mentions two methods of 
short writing, viz. one by contractions of 
words, and the other by arbitrary marks. 
I'his art was practised among the Romans 
at an early period. Indeed, the first in- 
vention of a system of short-hand, by wliich 
the writer was enabled to follow the most 
rapid speaker, has been ascribed by some 
to the poet Ennius, and it is said that it was 
afterwards improved by Tyro, Cicero’s freed 
man; and still more so by Seneca. Ennius 
began the practice with one thousand one 
hundred marks of his own contrivance. As 
an elucidation of this subject, and to show in 
what estimation this art was held among the 
Romans, we may briefly notice two of the 
Roman Emperors, of very opposite cha- 
racters; Caligula and Titus'Vespasian. It 
was deemed a great defect in one of them 
to be ignorant of short-hand, and a perfec- 
tion in the other, to be acquainted with this 
highly useful and ingenious art. Caligula was 
a man guilty of so many vices, that; it might 
be imagined his ignorance of siiort-hatid 
would not have fallen under the notice of 
an historian. And yet Suetonius mentions 
it as something remarkable, that he w'ho 
was so expert in other matters, and wanted 
not capacity and parts, was totally ignorant 
of short-hand. Titus Vespasian, on the 
contrary, was remarkable for writing short- 
hand exceedingly swift. He was indeed a 
true lover of the art, and made it not only 
his business but his diversion. It afforded 
him great pleasure to get his amanuenses 
together, and entertain himself with trying 
which of them could write fastest ; so that, 
by constant practice, he acquired such a 
command of hand, and such a facility in 
imitation, that he was wont to joke upon 
himself hnd say, what a special counterfeit 
he should have made. 
The different schemes of short-hand for- 
merly used, were probably much of the 
same nature, exceedingly arbitrary, and, for 
the most part, unintelligible to any but 
those who practised them ; and, for that 
reason, were soon forgotten and destroyed. 
We may guess at the fate they generally 
experienced, by two books of short-hand 
mentioned by Trithemius. The first was a 
dictionary of short-hand, which he bought 
of an abbot, who was a doctor of law, for a 
few pence, to the great satisfaction of the 
community to which he belonged, who had 
ordered the short-hand marks to be erased, 
for the sake of the parchment on which 
they were written. The other was a short- 
hand copy of the book of Psalms, which he 
met with in another monastry, where the 
learned monks had inscribed upon it, by 
way of title, “ A Psalter of the Armenia 
Language !” Several copies of a dictionary 
and psalter, in the Roman short hand, are 
mentioned as extant in different libraries ; 
but they are, in general, the same method, 
as may be judged by the accounts of those 
who mention them, and also from the appear- 
ance of the hand-writing of an old short- 
hand psalter, in the library of St. Ger- 
main’s at Paris, a few pages from which 
were transcribed for the use of the writer 
of these observations. 
Plutarch, in his life of Cato, informs us, 
that the celebrated speech of that patriot, 
relating to the Catilinian conspiracy, was 
taken and preserved in short-hand. There 
are numerous epigrams of Ausonius, Mar- 
tial, and Manilius, descriptive and com- 
mendatory of short hand. Probably the 
most ancient method of short-writing at 
present extant, is a Latin MS. entitled 
“ Ars Scribendi Characteris ;” or, “ The 
Art of Writing in Characters." The author 
of this tract is unknown ; but, we believe, 
it was printed about the year i 412 . 
The ancient Irish alphabets, particularly 
the first, which was purely stenographic, 
named Bobeloth, have a strong resem- 
blance to many of our modern short-hands, 
but they are now little known. A speci- 
men of this writing may be seen in Led- 
wich’s Antiquities, p. 98 . 
M. Larabinet, in his Researches upon 
Printing, observes, that modern stenogra- 
phy, which, like the telegraph, dates in 
France fl ora the foundation of the republic, 
has neither the inconvenience, nor tiie ob- 
scurity, nor the danger of the ancient. 
The old characters varied under the hand 
of the copiers, and the sense changed ac- 
cording to the genius of the interpreters ; 
so tliat their contractions are become so 
