11. "I should like to see such a Parliament anywhere else! My Aunt and Mr. Dick represented the Government or the opposition, (as the case might be,) and Traddles, with the assistance of Enfield's speaker, or a volume of Parliamentary orations, thundered astonishing invectives against them. Standing by the table, with his finger on the page to keep the place, and his right arm flourishing above his head, Traddles, as Mr. Pitt, Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Burke, Lord Castlereagh, Viscount Sidmouth, or Mr. Charming, would work himself into the most violent heats, and deliver the most withering denunciations of profligacy and corruption of my aunt and Mr. Dick, while I used to sit at a little distance with my note-book on my knee, fagging after him with all my might and main. The inconsistency and recklessness of Traddles were not to be exceeded by any real politician. He was for any description of policy in the compass of a week, and nailed all sorts of colors to every denomination of mast. My aunt, looking like an immoveable Chancellor of the Exchequer, would occasionally throw in an interruption or two, as ' hear,' or ' no,' or ' oh,' when the text seemed to require it, which was always a signal to Mr. Dick ( a perfect country-gentleman,) to follow lustily with the same cry. But Mr. Dick got taxed with such things in the course of his parliamentary career, and was made responsible for such awful consequences, that he he-came uncomfortable in his mind; sometimes, I believe, he actually began to be afraid he had really been doing something tending to the annihilation of the British constitution and the ruin of the country.

12. "Often and often we pursued these debates, until the clock pointed to midnight, and the candles were burning down. The result of so much good practice was, that by and by I begau w Reep pace with Traddles pretty well, and should have been triumphant quite had I had the least idea of what my notes were about. But as to reading them after I got them, I might as well have copied the Chinese inscriptions on an immense collection of tea-chests,. or the golden characters on all the great green and red bottles in the chemists' shops!

13. "There was nothing for it but to turn back and begin all over again. It was very hard, but I turned back, though with a heavy heart, and began laboriously and methodically to plod over the same tedious ground at a snail's pace, stopping to examine minutely every speck on the way on all sides, and making the most desperate efforts to know those illusive characters by sight whenever I met them."

14. Since the time to which this quotation refers, great improvements have been made in the stenographic art. We may as well just remark what a surprising thing it is that shorthand has so little been adopted in general use in this country. " Shorthand," says Dr. Johnson, " on account of its great and general utility, merits a much higher rank among the arts and sciences than is commonly allotted to it. Its usefulness is not confined to any particular science or profession, but is universal; it is therefore by no means unworthy of the attention and study of men of genius and erudition."

15. From the time of the first introduction of shorthand into England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to the present day, scores of systems have been invented, and between two and three hundred treatises on the subject have been published in England alone. We live in an age of improvement and wonder. We plough land, mow grass, thrash corn, and make bread by steam, and manufacture je ne sais quoi, and sew shirt-buttons on by machinery. Still we use, and to a tremendous extent, a system of writing which when compared with a good method of shorthand writing is as inferior in speed as a coach is to a railway train. Whenever we put our pen to paper we have four or five times more labor than is necessary, and if the public would exercise a little common sense and look into the matter, they would soon perceive the enormous loss of time we would save by adopting some shorter method of writing than that in common use.

16. Even suppose we simplified the formation of each letter of our alphabet, we should save a vast amount of trouble and time. An alphabet might easily be formed of simple characters consisting of the different parts of a square, a circle, and an ellipse. Take the letter "m," which requires six or seven different movements of the pen to form. Now if we can substitute a simple stroke such as or in the place of these six or seven, it is self-evident we should be gainers by it. And if such an improvement were adopted throughout the alphabet, a very large proportion of the time employed in writing would be saved. Take for instance one word, "commandment," which is formed of between forty and fifty different strokes; and if we had a single stroke of the pen to denote each letter we should have eleven of them. In Pitman's Phonography, three strokes and a dot express the word.

17. Most systems of shorthand are founded on a simplification in the formation of each letter, leaving out the vowels where they are not radical, and using certain marks or symbols to indicate short sentences which are of frequent occurrence. Many indeed are so full of perplexing arbitraries and useless complicated contractions, that it is no wonder, and we do not regret, that they have fallen into the regions of oblivion. Many of them are certainly easy to write, but unless a man were thoroughly expert at it, and unless the characters were written with an almost mathematical precision he might as well try to read the characters written on the tomb of Rameses the Great.

18. A shorthand, to be a good one, should be easy to write and easy to read. And when a man has accustomed himself to read the shorthand characters, which is only about as difficult as learning to read the Greek or German letters, he can read a book written in shorthand a deal quicker than he could read one written in the Romanic Style, and for this reason. We read " 1859" much quicker than we can "One thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine," and " £ 2 7 6" sooner than " Two pounds, seven shillings and sixpence." The figures, being within a smaller compass than the writing, catch the eye sooner, and words written in shorthand do not occupy so much space as if written in longhand.