ls and waxen tablets which have been recovered from
the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii. These tablets, however, have a
special value, for many of them contain autograph signatures of principals
and witnesses to legal deeds to which they were attached, together with
impressions of seals, in compliance with the Roman law which required the
actual subscriptions, or attested marks, of the persons concerned.

But, when we now speak of autographs and autograph collections, we use such
terms in a restricted sense and imply documents or signatures written by
persons of some degree of eminence or notoriety in the various ranks and
professions of life; and naturally the only early autographs in this sense
which could be expected to survive are the subscriptions and signatures of
royal personages and great officials attached to important public deeds,
which from their nature have been more jealously cared for than mere
private documents.

Following the Roman practice, subscriptions and signatures were required in
legal documents in the early centuries of our era. Hence we find them in
the few Latin deeds on papyrus which have come to light in Egypt; we find
them on the well-known Dacian waxen tablets of the 2nd century; and we find
them in the series of papyrus deeds from Ravenna and other places in Italy
between the 5th and 10th centuries. The same practice obtained in the
Frankish empire. The Merovingian kings, or at least those of them who knew
how to write, subscribed their diplomas and great charters with their own
hands; and their great officers of state, chancellors and others,
countersigned in autograph. The unlettered Merovingian kings made use of
monograms composed of the letters of their names; and, curiously, the
illiterate monogram was destined to supersede the literate subscriptions.
For the monogram was adopted by Charlemagne and his successors as a
recognized symbol of their subscription. It was their _signum manuale_,
their sign manual. In courtly imitation of the royal practice, monograms
and other marks were adopted by official personages, even though they could
write. The notarial marks of modern times are a survival of the practice.
By the illiterate other signs, besides the monogram, came to be employed,
such as the cross, &c., as signs manual. The monogram was used by French
monarchs from the reign of Charlemagne to that of Philip the Fair, who died
in 1314. It is very doubtful, however, whether in any inst