quote · Legacy record

It is a remarkable fact, that no man can ever get rid of the style of handwriting peculiar to his country. If he be English, he always writes in English style; if French, in French style; if German, Italian, or Spanish, in the style peculiar to his nation. Professor B—— states:—"I am acquainted with a Frenchman, who has passed all his life in England, who speaks English like one of our own countrymen, and writes it with ten times the correctness of ninety-nine in a hundred of us; but yet who cannot, for the life of him, imitate our mode of writing. I knew a Scotch youth, who was educated entirely in France, and resided eighteen years in that country, mixing exclusively with French people, but who, although he had a French writing-master, and, perhaps, never saw anything but French writing in his life, or rarely, yet wrote exactly in the Scotch style."

It is a remarkable fact, that no man can ever get rid of the style of handwriting peculiar to his country. If he be English, he always writes in English style; if French, in French style; if German, Italian, or Spanish, in the style peculiar to his nation. Professor B—— states:—"I am acquainted with a Frenchman, who has passed all his life in England, who speaks English like one of our own countrymen, and writes it with ten times the correctness of ninety-nine in a hundred of us; but yet who cannot, for the life of him, imitate our mode of writing. I knew a Scotch youth, who was educated entirely in France, and resided eighteen years in that country, mixing exclusively with French people, but who, although he had a French writing-master, and, perhaps, never saw anything but French writing in his life, or rarely, yet wrote exactly in the Scotch style."

Approximate author period: c. 1843 AD · industrial