LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 73, 25 August 1874, Page 3

LITERATURE.

SLIPS OF THE PRESS. [From Chambers’ Journal.] The ears of the sharpest reporters at ilines play them false; the pens of ready writers do iiot, as a rule, shape letters in the way Lord Palmerston loved ; type, like other matter, will get in the wrong place, and consequent errors escape the most lynx-eyed of ‘readers.’ The results may be annoying to the writer, provoking to the orator, and puzzling to the peruser, but are none the less amusing for all that. The omission of a single letter is sufficient to completely alter the meaning of a sentence. and convert a very ordinary piece of nows into an altogether incredible statement. Houdin himself could hardly have managed to steal ‘ a small ox out of a lady s reticule, and hide it in his waistcoat-pocket; and the greatest of gormandisers was never credited with having ‘ eaten a cabman ; ’ yet according to the newspaper reports, men have been found guilty of both offences. A like initial mishap led to the world being informed that the Russians had defeated cerPolish insurgents ‘with great laughter ;’ and by the cutting off of a final letter, a great party-leader was made to defy his opponents with the extraordinary announcement ‘ You cannot fight against the future ; Tim is on our side 1 ’ An American journal once gave a grave account of a river misadventure, wherein a steamer nearly came to grief through running against a rat explaining in its next issue that it should have said ‘ raft ; ’ and a Southern editor had to apologise for calling Mobile the fourth coffee-pot, instead of the fourth coffee port in the States. Only the other_ day, we saw an essay on the The Long Reigns of English Sovereigns alluded to as a ‘disquisition upon the long reins of English sovereigns;’ an absurd blunder, indeed, but not quite so bad as that in a bookseller’s catalogue, which made the ‘the immoral works of the poet Milton’ figure among his stock-in-trade ; or the exactly similar misprint in the poets’ corner of an Oxford newspaper, making some elegiac verses end ; Death is past, and all its sorrows Swallowed up in victory ;

Endless joys in bliss await, Life and immorality ! Rome admirer of the famous actress, Mrs Oldfield, wrote a funeral oration in her praise, which, thanks to the printer, opened thus: * Let oratory be silent, rhetoric be dumb ; let the pomp and pageantry of sorrow, the silent procession, the sable hearse, and the mourning fiends, pass unregarded by ! ’ To deprive the word ‘ windows’ of its n seems to be a favourite trick with compositors ; an auctioneer lately announced his intention of knocking down 4 a surplus stock of bay-widows, complete, glazed with best British plate ;’ and worse still, an Irish paper reporting the burning down of a schoolhouse, told how a brave fellow ran to the place, gained access to the school-room, ‘ at once kicked out three of the widows, and then proceeded to throw out the children to the "people assembled there, and by that means succeeded in saving several.’

Equally awkward results accrue from the substitution of one letter for another. A theatrical critic desiring to note the fact that a fair representative of Shakspeare’s Ariel ‘ did not sing,’ was made answerable for the uncomplimentary assertion that the lady ‘did nothing.’ A popular periodical added to our stock of historical knowledge by informing us that Henry IV. of England derived the 1 red nose’ from his grandfather, of course intending to say he inherited from his grandsire the cognizance of the red rose ; a blunder reminding one of Fanny Fudge’s complaint of the stupid printer transforming ‘ freshly blown roses’ into < fleshy brown noses ;’ and doubtless the writer of the heraldic essay re-echoed the fair Fanny’s anathema. Equally annoying must it have been to the clergyman who wrote of ‘ the force of a Scripture parable,’ to find himself made responsible for such an unclerical expression as ‘the farce of a Scripture parable.’ The printer of a statement circulated by an Accident Assurance Company, setting forth the compensation received by insurers unfortunate or fortunate enough to have occasion to test the value of their investments, seems to have set his mind upon producing the oddest misprints. According to the official document, one individual obtained two hundred pounds because his ‘ wig upset in turning a corner ; ’ another got three hundred pounds for being thrown from his 1 chairs ’ when his ‘ house took fright ; ’ and a third lost his life, thereby costing the Company a thousand pounds, by being ‘blown from his gig.’ In an American acting edition of Gerald Griffin’s Gisippus, Chromes heralds the arrival of the hero of the play with : There’s a smile!—you longed to see one— The smile successful lore wears ; instead of— The smile successful love wears. We should much like to know whether the misreading established itself upon the American stage. When Othello, wise all too late, becomes convinced of the baseness of his trusted ancient, the betrayed Moor exclaims :

I look down towards his feet ; but that’s a fable ! An allusion to cloven hoofs that utterly vanishes in a modern edition of the tragedy, where the line runs—

I look down towards his feet : but that’s a table ! e a new reading that might have emanated from a matter-of-fact commentator, and one which would doubtless affect the sensibilities of an audience quite as greatly as the original text. No stranger news ever came from Mexico than that General Pillow and thirty-seven men had been lost in a bottle j and no stranger remedy for neuralgia was ever propounded than that put forth by a Philadelphian journal, which assured all concerned they might easily abate their sufferings by simply putting a roasted i>ig in the mouth. A Western paper complimented the Russian Archduke Alexis by speaking of him as ‘ the noble Kuss,’ a misprint as likely to be due to the compositor s fancy for a joke, as to carelessness in setting up.’ Printers’ errors are sometimes suspiciously germane to the matter : one can hardly believe it was by pure accident that one newspaper startled its readers with the news that a tram had run over a cow and cut it in ; calves ;’ that another concluded its announcement of a theatrical performance for the benefit of the Goldsmiths’ and Jewellers’ Institute, with the notification: ‘Tickers only benefit ! ’ or that a third made its art critic describe one of Lance’s fruit pieces as ‘ a Sauce that makes the mouth water.’ A curious corruption of the text of the Pilgrim's Progress originated in the acci-

dental or intentional change of an e into an a. Bunyan makes Christian say of Faintheart, Mistrust, and Guilt, that although many called them cowards, they had made David groan, moan, and roar, had sorely brushed the coats of Reman and Hezekiah, and handled Peter so as to make him afraid of a sorry girl. Either a blundering printer, or an editor who knew not the name of Reman, one of the wise sons of Mahol, than whom Solomon alone was wiser, changed Reman to Raman. A later editor of Banyan’s great work, satisfied that the immortal tinker never associated the bafiled Agagite with David, Hezekiah, and Peter, as champions of the true faith, substituted Mordecai, as more worthy of the honour, and Mordecai has ever since been exalted at the expense of the true man.

Poetry is as easily marred by the insertion of an unnecessary letter as by the omission of a necessary one. Take these lines, for instance, as they were quoted in a review : And shall I blame you, sweet, because you choose A softer path of life than mine could be ? I keep our secret here, and no map-knows What passed five years ago ’twixt you and me— . ... v . *>' Two lovers begotten at the selfsame time, When that gold summertide was in its prime; , ■ . ] One love lives yet, and one died with the rose. t '..Vy, : Of course, we infer that the lady and gentleman were born at the selfsame hour, in the midsummer season ; but the poet really never hinted anything of the sort, for he wrote:— , , .

Two loves begotten at the selfsame time, When that gold summertide was in its prime. As Portia’s love-anxious eyes follow the steps of her heart’s lord as he moves towards the fateful caskets,; she compares Bassanio to Young Alcides, when he did redeem The virgin-tribute paid by howling Troy ; by merely transposing a couple of letters, the. above lines are modernised with a vengeance into— Young Alcides, when he did redeem The virgin-tribute paid by howling Tory, An author’s meaning may be perverted even without omitting, adding, or altering a single letter, or meddling with his punctuation. In Nicholl’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, ho gives an account of the presentation of .a Bible to the queen by the citizens of London, and then remarks : ‘ Which passage shews a swell how the City stood affected to religion;’ but what he meant to say, if the printer had allowed him, was : 1 Which passage shews as well how the City stood affected to religion, as what hopes the kingdom might entertain of the queen’s favor towards it.’ A curious misprint, involving an absurd impossibility, is to be found in an edition of Shakspeare’s plays published within the last five years ; the following words being put in the mouth of Henry IV,, when recounting the smooth and welcome news brought by Sir Walter Blunt from the North :

The Earl of Douglas is discomfited ’ Ten thousand Sects, two and twenty knights, Balked in their own blood, did Sir Walter

On Holmedon’s plains. Here the error is palpable enough ; but generally speaking, when it is a matter not of letters but of words, typographical mistakes may easily pass undetected. Few readers of Thackeray’s Lectures upon the English Humorists would see anything out of the way in his alluding to Smollett’s Dr Morgan as ‘ the wild apothecary,’ or suspect that ‘ wild ’ might to be ‘ Welsh ; ’ and we are sure no one acquainted with the writings of Mrs Mauley would demur to her being styled ‘ the detestable authoress of the New Atalantis,' although Thackeray really wrote ‘ the delectable authoress.’ For slips of this sort, however, the writer must be held accountable. To illegible or doubtful handwriting we are certainly indebted for the odd statement respecting Mr Livingstone, that he was well in health, but much troubled by the people about him : ‘ the savants are not to be trusted, and it was only by stratagem that he got his letter forwarded to Mr Kirk ; ’ for ‘ savants ’ read ‘ servants,’ and the statement may be accepted as true. It was not the compositor’s fault that a new geranium was lauded as likely to prove ‘ a great addition to our pastures' instead of ‘ to our parterres ; ’ that an actress noted for dressing superbly was said to have ‘ lisped as usual in the best taste ; ’ or that the military world was amused by a newspaper announcing, long before ‘ autumn manoeuvres ’ were thought of, that the authorities at Aldershot had ordered every regiment in camp to be marched out twice a week, to [battle, attended by one combatant and one medical officer, when the order issued was that the troops should bathe regularly. Neither can there be much doubt that the pen was to blame for its being necessary for the New Haven Register to tell its readers : ‘ln the article upon Yale College, in our last, for “alum water" read alma mater!' A blunder ridiculous enough, in all conscience, but not so ridiculous as that perpetrated by the Pittsburgh Argus, when it described a certain gentleman as ‘a nobby old burglar, prowling around in a naked state,’ in place of lauding him as ‘ a noble old burgher, proudly loving his native state.’ Press errors of another description must be debited rather to treacherous ears than heedless hands. That fact, however, would hardly reconcile a man to seeing a near relative set down in a blue-book as ‘ a pauper in the work-house,’ instead of ‘ a partner in the works ; ’ or console a bishop for being made to reckon curates among the great hindrances to the spread of the gospel, when he merely pronounced against the system of pew-rates. Parliamentary orators have not much reason to complain of maltreatment at the hands of the bal’d-working gentlemen of the reporters’ gallery, still they are strangely misrepresented at times. When Italy showed herself ambitious of becoming a European power, a speaker declaring all the Italians wanted was ‘ to be a nation,’ found himself reported as having said they ‘ wanted to be in Asia.’ Another, indulging in some sneers at the ‘ atteuders of clubs,’ appeared next morning as an assailant of ‘ vendors of gloves.’ A silver-voiced lawyer complimenting the leader of the House, byremarking of hi ra, that ‘ eloquence was bursting from every pore ; ’ had the sentence transformed by a cruel reporter into ‘ ■perspiration exudedfrom every pore; ’ and when, in ‘ another place,’ the same legal light pronounced the law administered in Courts of Equity to be a perfect terra incognita to practitioners in the Courts of Common Law, he was represented to have said the justice administered in the one was ‘ a perfect terror ’ to practitioners in the other. To be continued.