Timothy Bright, who led this era, and whose treatise was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, was very sanguine about the excellence of his system. :Modern writers, however, are prone to depreci ate the advantages that he claimed. Each letter of his alphabet could be written in four direc tions, as follows: 1\1_ . The first letter alone of a word was written out : by adding to this dif ferent terminations, different words would be ex pressed, and each of these words was to be com mitted to memory. Thus: 1 abound, and about ; J accept, and t accuse; J advance, and 1„ air; d again, and 9 age; .4 all, and ti almost; also, and k although. Three dozen other words were made by giving the letter the other slopes indicated; thus: — alter, and — am; -? amend, and — anger, etc. In this way. 864 words could be constructed out of the letters of the alphabet, and each must be committed to memory. This set makes up the author's 'Char acterie Table,' as he calls it. Then we have 2S pages of `appella tine' or synonymous words, with a certain short mark on one side of each letter; placing this on the opposite side reverses the meaning, giving us the antonyms; as .1 abandon, but t retain or keep. One sign also is made to stand for all synonymous words, such as veracity, truthfulness, sincerity, etc. Following this list again comes a "Table of English Words." filling ISO pages more, all to he 'learned by heart.' In 1600 Peter Bales brought out a system similar in some respects to Bright's. but which was no easier for the memory. Bales called his system 'brachygraphy.' The next system that indicated progress ap peared twelve years later, by John Willis. and was called "The Art of Stenography. or short writing by Spelling Characterie." That is, spelling out the words and joining the letters, instead of mak ing every word an arbitrary sign to be committed to memory. This was the first real stenographic alphabet for shorthand, and a decided advance be yond Bright. The advance. indeed, was such that the author sincerely believed he had reached the goal, in spite of the many drawbacks in the cumbrous letters, and in the large omissions neces sary to secure any degree of brevity, and the still larger number of indispensable arbitraries. The art nevertheless did not stand still, and even during his lifetime Edmond Willis had an nounced the device of separating the vowels from the consonants, and placing them around the strokes in different positions, so that they might be written or not according to need and oppor tunity.
During the following twenty-five years, about ten publications appeared, each with new' char acteristics. but the only one that gained any lasting reputation was that of Jeremiah Pich • in 1654, entitled Scmigraphy, or Art's Raritm. It is better known by a later title, The Pen's Dex terity. Rich's shorthand continued to be pub lished with slight changes for at least 150 years.
There is no very striking advance in Rich's system beyond some of the previous systems; such awkward forms as h h., Y y, z z still appear in the alphabet, and it included over 300 pure arbitraries. The Book of Psalms and the whole of the New Testament were engraved at great expense in Rich's system. Contemporaneous with it, some dozen systems appeared, many of them quite different in the structure of the alphabet, but no new principle of worth was evolved. The best of these, and the one that obtained most celebrity, was that of William Mason, first pub lished in 1672. The alphabet of Mason's first
edition follows Rich's alphabet closely; but that of the third edition departs widely from it. He divides his shorthand principles into four parts: "(I) Spelling Characterie, or the writing of words completely according to sound ; by vowels according to their places (three beside the strokes) ; by conionants single, double, or treble; or by prepositions or terminations. (2) Symbolical shorthand, which uses natural marks for words and sentences—a kind of image visible to represent the words. (3) Deficient writing, when some part of a word stands for the whole, as ab for abbreriatc or abbreviation, etc. (4) Arbitrary characters—small marks or dots made at pleasure for some words in frequent use which cannot be made so short by the letters of the alphabet. There are no less than 423 of these symbolical and arbitrary characters to learn. But great discovery was the use of the circle as a duplicate form for the letter s, which has been continued in the structure of some of the most successful systems to the present day.
The last edition of Mason's system is the foun dation of the famous Gurney system, which was first published by Thomas Gurney in 1751, and which obtained its fame, not so much from any special merit that it possessed as from the cir cumstance that Mr. Gurney obtained an appoint ment from the Government as its shorthand writ er—an appointment that has descended with the Gurney family to this day, giving them a monop oly of publishing the debates of the Commons. though much the larger proportion of their staff now use the Isaac Pitman system.
During the latter part of the eighteenth cen tury, and while these last-named systems were in use, some fifty others were issued, none of which made any important place for itself in shorthand history except Byrom's, Taylor's, and Mayor's. Byrom (1767) seems to have had more regard for the ease and gracefulness with which his letters were formed and united than for brevity of style; and in order to attain this ob ject, he employed duplicate forms for a number of his letters, and even a triplicate in the case of 1, as will be seen by a reference to his alphabet in Table 1. Still using the old unphonetic vowel scale, he represented the five vowels by dots placed in order beside the strokes, but arranged in the case of curved horizontals in a manner that appears strange to a modem writer; thus: an, en, in, on, lin. Taylor (1786), appar ently making brevity his first and sole aim, discarded all medial vowels, hut used a dot occa sionally to indicate the presence of any open or sounded vowel at the beginning or end of a word. Ile says: "Some have characters to represent all the vowels, which they use in common, as in other writing, namely, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of words. But this kind of writing ought not to come under the denomi nation of shorthand." etc. Taylor also aban doned the use of all arbitrary characters. At later dates, Harding and Odell, having an eye to legibility as well as to brevity, modified Tay lor's vowel principle; the former using a dot and a dash according to position with regard to the letter, as 'I at, 9 et, .1 it, ot, art; and the ter employing a different sign for each vowel without regard to position, as J at, et, t it, ot, q ut, d aul, 4 out. In neither case, however, were these vowel signs generally in sorted. Both Harding and Odell also used a few arbitrary characters, but very few.