it. There is little doubt that St. Paul dictated to stenographers his epistles to the Colossians.

The famous preacher Origen (A.D. 185-253) has left on record the statement that he prepared his addresses in shorthand. He did not, however, permit the addresses to be reported until after he was sixty years of age, when he had acquired such skill as an orator that he could be certain that his orations were given in the form he wished. St. Augustine employed ten stenographers. Basil the Great (A.D. 329-379) wrote:

Words have wings, therefore we use signs so that we can attain in writing the swiftness of speech. But you, oh, youth, must make the signs very carefully and pay attention to an accurate arrangement of them, as through a little mistake a long speech will be disfigured, while by the care of the writer a speech may be correctly repeated.

Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. Great (A.D. 590-604), in the dedication to his famous "Homilies," mentions that he had revised them from the stenographic reports. St. Jerome had ten stenographers, four of whom took down his dictation, while six were transcribers who wrote out what the others had taken from dictation. This fact is an illustration of how "efficiency" was highly regarded even at that early time, and that shorthand had reached a commendable degree of accuracy. How many stenographers to-day can read one another's notes?

§ 4

Bearing in mind the fact that the Tironian notes consisted of thousands of arbitrary signs for words and phrases, that the famous orator Seneca developed the Tironian notes by five

thousand additional signs of his own invention, and that Bishop Cyprian added many thousands of abbreviations for scriptural terms, one may have some idea of the difficulties with which the students of shorthand in ancient times had to contend. Perhaps these long lists of arbitraries were responsible for the sad fate of Cassianus when teaching shorthand. Cassianus had been a bishop of Brescia, and when he was expelled from his see, he established an academy at Imola, in the Province of Bologna, in which he taught shorthand. It is recorded that his exasperated pupils suddenly surrounded him and stabbed him to death with their styli. There is no explanation as to what they were exasperated about, but I conjecture that he had assigned them a lesson of a thousand extra arbitraries of his own invention. Fortunate indeed is the teacher of modern shorthand whose students are armed only with harmless pencils.

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Marcus Aurelius Prudentius, who, in the third century, was the most famous of the Roman Christian poets, expresses regret at the unhappy fate of a shorthand-writer who was reporting a trial in court. The centurion Metellus, having been converted to Christianity, refused to remain soldier. He was what we should now term "a conscientious objector." When the judge decided the case against him and condemned him to death, the shorthand-writer who had been employed by Metellus flung his tablets at the head of the judge. By order of the judge he was promptly torn to pieces. It was decreed that stenographers who copied the writings of the teachers of heretical doctrines should have their hands "hewn off."

Then there is the sad case of the stenographer to a great ecclesiastic who, finding his stenographer dozing when he should have been transcribing his notes, dealt him such a vigorous blow on the ear that the stenographer died from the effects of it, and the churchman had to leave the city in order to avoid trial for manslaughter. The prevailing fashion of our stenographers of to-day in covering their ears makes such a "custom" impossible.

With the crude form of shorthand that then prevailed, shorthand-writers had enough to worry about; but we find that the Emperor Severus, in the third century, decreed that a shorthand-writer who made a mistake in reporting a case should be banished and have the nerves of his fingers cut so that he could never write again.

In 1903 archæologists discovered, one hundred miles south of Cairo, a great many ancient documents on papyri. Among them was a contract with a shorthand-writer, dated A.D. 137, whereby a boy was to be taught shorthand for the sum of 120 drachmæ (about $24.00); 40 drachmæ to be paid in advance, 40 drachmæ on satisfactory evidence of the progress of the boy in the acquirement of the art, and a final 40 drachmæ when he had become a proficient writer. Remember that this was 137 years after the birth of Christ. Shorthand was so much in demand in those days that there may have been some profiteering among the teachers of it, because we find that in A.D. 301 the Emperor Diocletian issued an edict fixing tuition fees at seventy-five denares per month for each pupil, about a dollar and a half a month. Evidently the high cost of living did not vex teachers in those days.

St. Augustine records the fact that the stenographers of Rome went on strike on one occasion and succeeded in securing their demands. Just imagine for a moment what would happen if all the stenographers of to-day went on strike. The whole world of commerce, our whole political and social life, would be disorganized.

Peocopius, who was a stenographer to the Emperor Constantine II, became a count. He attempted to seize Julius's crown, but, vacillating at the critical moment, was betrayed by his generals and put to death. A teacher of oratory, Fabius Quintilian (A.D. 35-95), in publishing his "Guide to the Art of Oratory," complained that his lectures, published by others under his name, had injured him because they had been reported by "greedy shorthand-writers who had taken them down, and circulated them." stated that the early Christians bribed the judicial shorthand-writers to take down the sayings of the Christian on trial. These were preserved in the archives and read at the martyrs' anniversaries in order to encourage the faithful.

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With the decline and dissolution of the Roman Empire, shorthand, like all other arts, lost favor. It was no longer regarded as a great, fashionable art. The Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century, forbade his records being kept by the "catches and short-cut riddles of signs." Later, Frederick II ordered the destruction of all shorthand-characters as being "necromantic and diabolical." As the Holy Roman Empire then covered almost the entire known world, the edict of Frederick II rendered shorthand one

of the lost arts. Then came the Dark Ages, and for nearly a thousand years the arts and sciences, among them shorthand, were banished from the world.

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With the decline of the church, and the decay of empires and feudal powers, there came a revival of learning, and the birth of new ideals of human life and culture. There came freedom of speech, as manifested in the Renaissance in Italy and in the Reformation in Germany and England. The peoples of the earth awoke from the long lethargy of the Middle Ages. Columbus sailed the seas and discovered a new world, Copernicus became the father of modern astronomy, and Galileo, of modern science. It was a great age: Shakspere wrote, Gutenberg invented movable type, and Caxton, the printing-press.

fiery tongue of the orator? Yet historians say that Savonarola's orations were so eloquent that they strung the Florentines to heights of spiritual emotion which they had never before or since attained. Let us, then, be charitable to Lorenzo Viola, who had to report when such waves of emotional frenzy were sweeping over the audience surrounding him.

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The first system of shorthand published in modern times was that of Dr. Timothy Bright, whose system of "characterie" was published in London in 1588. Dr. Bright, in the introduction to his book, said that he was inspired to devise his system through reading Plutarch's reference to the reporting of the Catilinian conspiracy.

The full title of Dr. Bright's book was, "Characterie. An Arte of Shorte,

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The first evidence of the revival of shorthand that we have in the Renaissance is in the fact that the orations of the reformer Savonarola (1452-1498) were reported in some form of abbreviated writing by Lorenzo di Jacopo Viola. There are many omissions or incomplete sentences in these reports, and in parenthesis there is this quaint explanation by the reporter, "Here I was unable to proceed because of weeping." Was the reporter merely camouflaging his own inability to keep pace with the

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Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character." The system was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and letters patent were issued to the author by the crown, dated July 13, 1588, giving him the exclusive right to the publication and use of shorthand.

The art of shorthand has been known by many titles. "Characterie" did not meet with favor, and it was superseded by branchygraphy, tachygraphy, stenography, and many other names. It is a curious thing that the first mention of the word "shorthand," by which the art is now generally known, is in an epitaph which is still to be seen in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. It is to William Laurence, who died December 28, 1661, and reads:

Shorthand he wrot, his flowre in prime

did fade,

And hasty death shorthand of him hath made.

Dr. Bright was a man of rare attainments. He was a distinguished physician and an author of several books of importance. In 1586 one of his books was called "A Treatise on Melancholy," and it is believed that it suggested to Shakspere many of the pranks of mad people as set forth in his plays, and especially, "Hamlet." Shakspere was twenty-four years of age when Bright's book was published, and no doubt he was familiar with it, as it created a stir at the time; indeed, the word "characterie" is used in two of his plays. Bright's "Treatise on Melancholy" was published in 1586, and therefore long preceded "Hamlet." Recent investigators have found that several expressions in "Hamlet," which were heretofore believed to have been original with Shakspere, are to be found in Bright's book; such as "discourse of reason."

Bright's system was arbitrary and had not an alphabet that could be connected; it was simply a list of signs to be used for words. The first system with an alphabet was that of John

Willis, published in 1602, and from that time on there was a steady stream of systems or modifications of systems. In the next century and a half more than two hundred systems were published.

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There was great interest in shorthand at this time. The people were eagerly desirous of preserving in permanent form the utterances of their beloved religious leaders. All textbooks of that time reflect this, because they are full of abbreviations for biblical phrases. John and Charles Wesley, the founders of the Methodist Church, were shorthand-writers. The Wesleys used the celebrated system of Dr. John Byrom.

Dr. Philip Doddridge, in his famous theological college, insisted that all students preparing for the ministry should learn shorthand first in order that they might easily take down his lectures. In 1628 Bishop Earle denounced certain "graceless" persons who did not scruple to report sermons in stenography and then palm them off later as their own.

But shorthand was used for other purposes. The most famous diary ever published was that of Samuel Pepys, which was written in the Shelton system. In this diary Pepys gives a vivid account of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, with many intimate accounts of the court of King Charles II. Pepys was an expert shorthand-writer, because he mentions in his diary that in April, 1680, he attended the king, by command, at Newmarket, and there "took down in shorthand from his own mouth the narrative of his escape from the battle of Worcester."

It is interesting to recall that Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his friend Page, dated January 23, 1764, proposed that they should master Shelton's system, the one used by Pepys, so that they might have something which was unintelligible to any one else. He said, "I will send you some of these days Shelton's Tachygraphical Alphabet and directions."

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There is evidence that the art of shorthand was in use in this country within half a dozen years of the landing of the Pilgrims. In the library at Springfield, Massachusetts, there is preserved the shorthand note-books of Major John Pynchon, the son of the founder of Springfield, containing reports of the sermons of the first pastor of Springfield, the Rev. George Moxon. These sermons are dated from 1637 to 1639, seventeen years after the coming of the Mayflower.

A majority of the writers of shorthand in New England in the early colonial days were men of distinction. Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was a very accomplished shorthand-writer. An Indian Bible belong

ing to him in which are annotations in shorthand is still preserved in one of the historical societies. It is not, however, generally known that many years before coming to this country Roger Williams, at nineteen years of age, was employed by the famous lawyer Sir Edward Coke to report the proceedings of the Star Chamber in 1618.

John Winthrop, Jr., the son of the first governor of Massachusetts, and who was himself afterward Governor of Connecticut, was an accomplished shorthand-writer. When he arrived in Boston in 1631 he proceeded to superintend the settlement of the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, while his wife Martha remained in Boston. They corresponded in shorthand, and many of these shorthand letters, which were written in 1633, are preserved by the Winthrop families under the date of that year. I mention this particularly because Martha Winthrop is the first American shorthand-writer of the gentler sex of whom we have record. As early as 1650 Sir Ralph Verney spoke of the "multitudes of women practicing shorthand in church." A discourse published in 1700 was de