A DISAPPEARING ART

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 138, 8 December 1921, Page 12

A DISAPPEARING ART

England at one time possessed * penman capable of rivalling Nessi Effendi Mwkarera, «n Arab, who recently visited Cairo with specimens of his art, including a grain of rice on whioh he has written 110 words from the Koran, says the Manchester Guardian. Peter Bales, as ,we learn from Holinshed's Chronicle, put in the compass of a silver penny more things than would fill several ordinary pages, and presented Queen Elizabeth with the manuscript set in a gold Ting, and covered with a crystal, together with a magnifying-glass so powerful that the queen could easily decipher the manuscript, "which she held on her thumbnail, and commended the same to the Lords of the Council and the ambassa- j dors." Bales subsequently issued a challenge "to all Englishmen and strangers" I to ■ write for a pen of gold of £20 in value, in all kinds of hands, "best, straightest, and fastest," and most kinds ! of ways, "a full, a mean, a small, with line and without lino; in a slow set hand, a mean faoile hand, and a fast running hand," and, further, to write "truest and speediest, most secretary and clerk-like, from a man's mouth, reading, or pronouncing, either English or Latin. Another writing-master, David Johnson, accepted the rhallenge, and the contest opened on Michaelmas Day, 1595, before i five judges and a hundred spectators. Bales was adjudged the winner in all three sections, though the competition in "writing sundry kinds of tair hands" proved a near thing for him. He gained points for the beauty and1 "most authentic proportion" of his "Roman hand," but Johnsop scored marks in court hand and in "bastard secretary" hand. Bales, being then on his mettle, presented his "Master Piece," composed of "secretary and Roman hand four ways varied," and offered to forego all his previous advantages if Johnston could better it. This proved impossible, so Bales carried off the gold pen, and h«d it painted and set up for his eign. ■ ■■ Sir John Wrench Tow«e, who has been 50 years wi^i the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, and is now vacating the office of clerk (held before him by his father and grandfather), regrets, as many have regretted, that, "we have done away with beautiful handwriting." ;Not that he fails to appreciate the utility of the typewriter, but beauty, if it stands in office correspondence for great labour and much Ices of time, is beauty still, and lo3t is to be lamented. . •