clean.  It unites with wonderful taste the highest degrees of simplicity and ornament.  Each style is used, and both are blended, as occasion required.  During his ministry, the trouble about the old record-book occurred.  The first four pages of the new book are in his handwriting.  The ink has somewhat faded; the paper has become discolored, and, around the margins and at the bottom of the leaves, lamentably worn and broken.  The first page exhibits Lawson’s penmanship in its various styles.  It is artistically executed in several sizes of letters, appropriate to the position of the clauses and the import and weight of the matter.  In each there is an elegant combination of ornament and simplicity.  His chirography was often had in requisition; and papers, evidently from his pen, are on file in various cases, occurring in court at the time, in which his friends were interested.

The first four ministers of the village parish were excellent penmen.  Bayley’s hand is more like the modern style than the rest.  Burroughs’s is as legible as print, uniform in its character, open and upright.  The specimen among the autographs is from the record referred to at the top of page 262.  As it was written at the bottom of a page in the record-book, where there was hardly sufficient room, it had to be in a slanting line.  I give it just as it there appears.  Parris wrote three different hands, all perfectly easy to read.  The larger kind was used when signing his name to important papers, or in brief entries of record.  The specimen I give is from a receipt in the parish-book, which Thomas Putnam, as clerk, made oath in court, that Parris wrote and signed in his presence.  His notes of examinations of persons charged with witchcraft by the committing magistrate, many of which are preserved, are in his smallest hand, very minute, but always legible.  In his church-records he uses sometimes a medium hand, and sometimes the smallest.  The autographs of Townsend Bishop and Thomas Putnam show the handwriting that seems to have prevailed among well-educated people in England at the time of the first settlement of this country.  There was often a profusion of flourishes that obscured the letters.  The initial capitals were quite complicated and very curious.  The signature of Thomas Putnam, Jr., exhibits his excellent handwriting.

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I have adduced these facts and given these illustrations to show, that, in this branch of education,—­the value and desirableness of which cannot be overrated,—­it is at least an open question, whether we have much ground to boast of being in advance of the first generations of our ancestors in America.  The early ministers of the Salem Village parish certainly compare, in this particular, favorably with ministers and professional men, and recording officers generally in public bodies of all kinds, in later times.