[Illustration: FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIR PROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS]
In the early empire the Romans used two sorts of characters, Capital and Cursive. The Capitals were square-shaped or rustic, _i.e._ slightly ornamented. They were used for inscriptions and other writing demanding prominence, as we use capitals nowadays, borrowing the old Roman forms. The Cursive or running characters are the originals of our small types, and were used for correspondence and other purposes where rapid writing was an object, abbreviations, which are the forerunners of our modern "shorthand," being sometimes employed. Out of this cursive hand there arose a variety of hand-writings, the most important among these being the Irish "semi-uncial." The appearance of this script in that island is one of the problems of graphiology. "No Irish hand is known out of which it could have arisen. And yet in the sixth century Ireland suddenly becomes the chief school of Western calligraphy, and the so-called Irish uncial blazes forth in full splendour as the most magnificent of all mediæval scripts. Only one conclusion seems possible. Some time in the fifth century a fully-formed, book-hand must have been introduced by St. Patrick (432-458 A.D.), doubtless from Gaul, where he received his consecration. And this must have been cultivated as a calligraphic script in the Irish monasteries, which at this time enjoyed comparative immunity from the ravages of the Teutonic invaders, who, in the fifth century, desolated Italy, Gaul, and Spain." (Taylor, ii. 173.) Irish monks introduced it into Northumbria, and in course of time there was derived from it the "Caroline minuscule," as it is called, because it was introduced in the reign of Charlemagne in the famous school at Tours founded by Alcuin of York, a celebrated scholar of the eighth century, and friend of the Emperor. As a clear hand, compressible into a small space, it grew rapidly in favour till the end of the twelfth century, when a period of decadence, of which the ugly "Black Letter" was the result, set in and held sway in Western Europe for a generation after the discovery of printing with movable types. The Black-letter characters were imitations of the coarse thick characters of the monkish manuscripts, and it was not till the early part of the sixteenth century that they were displaced in England by the Roman letters, whose basis is the Caroline minuscule (see p. 37). Here, however, we are on the threshold of the "chapel," and must retrace our steps for brief survey of the few changes introduced into the Latin alphabet in adapting it to the requirements of the English language. These are shown in the admirable table borrowed from Canon Taylor. (_History of the Alphabet_, i. 72.) The order of the letters (an unexplained problem in the history of the alphabet) approximates to that of the Phœnicians, and their names are based on the same principle as that of the Latin. Running our eye down the table we note that our alphabet provides for certain phonetic variations by turning the Latin I into I and J, and VV or UV into double U = W. The Anglo-Saxon, which appears to be partly Roman and partly Irish in origin, had borrowed two useful characters from the Runic, Þ = w, named _wen_, and Þ = th, named _thorn_, which for a time formed part of the English alphabet. The _thorn_ has been revived of late, as a bastard archaic, in the printing of _the_ as _y^e_, with consequent mispronunciation of that word by those who see it thus changed. Both Y and Z were late importations from the Greek into the Latin, being used only in Greek loan-words to denote sounds peculiar to the Greek; hence, as the most recent arrivals, their appearance at the end of the alphabet. Some of our letters are of little use; K makes C superfluous, and Q and X are of no more service to us than they were to the Romans. So that, for practical purposes, we have only twenty-three letters wherewith to indicate at least thirty-two sounds. Thus our alphabet, like our spelling (which is ever at war with our pronunciation, to the bewilderment of school children and foreigners), is what it is from the lack of any consistent rule. Nevertheless, so workable a set of signs has secured a footing which, made firmer by the art of printing, is not likely to be disturbed by any processes of phonetic change which mark the course of speech. To that art of printing is also due those modifications in handwriting which distinguish the penmanship of past and present times.