Rensselaer Gazette, Volume 3, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1859 — Fine Writing. [ARTICLE]

Fine Writing.

.Anci«*nt history abounds with anecdotes of men whose greatest feats consisted in writing so exceedingly fine that it was invisible to the n.ked eye. One wrote a verse of Homer on a grain of millet, and another, a very persevering character, wrote the whole of the I Iliad in so small a space that it could be enclosed in a nutshell. Menage gives art account of a whole sentence that was invisible without the aid of the microscope; and pictures and portraits, which appeared at first to be lines anti scratches thrown do' < at random, would form when viewed with microscope, an exact resemblance of some person. One man read a thousand verses in praise of tiis princes, that was written on a piece of paper only a foot in length. Peter Bales, an Englishn an, who lived in the reign of Elizabeth, astonished the whole world by copying the Bible and putting the manuscript in a nut-shell no larger than a hen's egg. Any one nearly, who possesses common ingenuity, can write the Lord’s prayeron a live-cent piece. D’lsraelli speaks as follows in relerence to minute writing: ‘•On this subject it may be worth noticing that the learned Huet asserts that he, like the rest of the world, for a longtime considered as a fiction the story of that industrious writer who i.- said to have inclosed the Iliiad in a nut-shell. But having examined the matter more closely, he thought it possible.” One day in company at the Dauphin’s that learned man trifled half an hour in proving it. A piece ol vellum about ten inches n length and eight in width, pliant and firm, can be tolded up and inclosed in the shell of a large walnut It can hold in its bredth one line vvhicn can contain thirty verses, and in its length two hundred and fifty lines. With a crow-ijuill the writing can be perfected. A page of tiiis piece of vellum will then contain 7,600 verses, and the reverse as much; the whole 15,000 verses of the Iliiad. And this he proved in their presence, by using a piece of paper, and with a common The thing is possibie to be efl’ected; and il on any occasion paper should he most excessively rare, it may be useful to know that a volume of matter may be contained in a single leaf. Emperor of Russia has organized a special Commission to prepare plans for the emancipation rs the «erf«.