Book Two

 Artificially-Clothed Inversion takes place when, to avert suspicion, we adopt such a method that the letters, while still running backward, are clothed in words that read forward. An example of such writing is the well known couplet:

Signa te signa, temere me tangis et angis
Roma tibi subito motibue ibit amor.

Since, however, this Mode is fitted for the use of learned poets and others, and has little application to the every-day intercourse of life, and to letter-writing, we have no occasion to dwell on it at length here. To this head seems to belong the clever device which consists in so writing, that, whether the letters are read from left to right or from right to left, perfect words and perfect discourse, albeit different, are in each case formed. There was circulated not long since a composition of this kind extolling the Bohemians, which, if read backward, turned to their disparagement. But since this method has properly to do with the back-ward reading of words themselves, and not with that of letters, and since, further, as I have already said, it in no way serves the purposes of our art, I dismiss it from further consideration; enough to have spoken of it once for all here.