LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 74, 26 August 1874, Page 3

LITERATURE.

SLIPS OF THE PRESS. [From "Chambers' Journal."] Concluded.

Lord Brougham was fond of relating an amusing instance of misreporting, which was no joke to the victim of it. A bishop, at one of his country visitations, found occasion to complain of the deplorable state of a certain church, the roof of which was evidently anything anything but watertight; after rating those concerned for their neglect, his lordship finished by declaring emphatically that he would not visit the damp old church again until it was put in decent order. His horror may be imagined when he discovered himself in the local journal as having declared : ' I shall not visit this damned old church again.' The bishop lost no time in calling the editor's attention to the mistake ; that worthy thereupon setting himself right with his readers by stating that he willing gave publicity to his lordship's explanation, but he had every confidence in the accuracy of his reporter. The editor of an evening paper could hardly have had similar confidence in his subordinate when the latter caused his journal to record that a prisoner had been sentenced to 'four months' imprisonment in the House of Commons !' In this case, we fancy the reporter must have been in the same exhilirated condition as his American brother, who ended his account of a city banquet with the frank admission ; l lt is not distinctly remembered by anybody present who made the last speech !' Not long since, one of our daily instructors gave the British public the interesting information that twenty-five Russian men-of-war were preparing to proceed to the Black Sea ' to take part in the autumn manoeuvres next summer ;' and another announced that a particular composition of Beethoven's would be performed at the Monday popular concerts the ensuing Saturday. One morning paper, with loose geographical notions, placed Victoria in South Australia, and another transformed that colony into an island ; while the leading journal itself, oblivious of the existence of the Medway, told us of an ironclad being turned into the Thames from Chatham dockyard. Forgetting its Lempriere, the same great authority likened the sleeping cabin of the Khedive's yacht to ' a very temple of Momus ;' ignoring royal cousinship, it dubbed the Duke of Cambridge the Prince of Wales's ' uncle ;' and one fine morning startled its readers by announcing, that upon one day in a certain week, one hundred and forty cases of cholera occurred in Naples in forty-eight hours. This extraordinary item of intelligence came from a special correspondent, and ' specials' are allowed, like poets, a good deal of license. During the late war, one of them telegraphed to a London paper that an English officer had delivered messages from the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Cambridge, congratulating the Emperor of Germany upon his successes in France. Of course the story was untrue, and very quickly officially declared so ; but while the matter was of such high moment as to necessitate the Premier himself setting it right in parliament, the author of the canard coolly wrote a few days afterwards : ' The messages in question were of a purely personal character, and in no way concerned the successes of the German arms. I hasten to rectify the slight error that happened in the statement I transmitted!' There was something more than a slight error in a paragraph in a Yorkshire newspaper expressing "great regret at having to record ' the death of the father of the Liverpool council, Alderman Cooper, who is seventy-eight years of age, and has been a member of the council for over eighty years.' 1 A{remarkable man that 1

Advertisers are adepts at ambiguity. A lady advertises her desire to obtain a husband ' with a Roman nose having strong religious tendencies.' ' A spinster particularly fond of children' informs the public that she ' wishes for two or three, having none of her own? Somebody wants 'a young man to look after a horse of the Methodist persuasion ;' a draper desires to meet with an assistant who would 'take an active and energetic interest in a small first-class trade, and in a quiet family;' and a Boston chemist advertises ' the gentleman who left his stomach for analysis will please call and get it, together with the result.' Slipshod English is not, however, confined to the advertisement columns, or we should not be able to read of the shooting of a wild-cat ' by a little boy five feet eight inches long ;' of a procession, which ' was very fine, and nearly two miles in length, as was also the prayer of Mr Perry, the chaplain ;' nor should we be 'much scandalised to note the fact,' that' Miss Oorry, in the presence of a large number of Admiralty officials, named the ship yesterday, and she was quietly warped out to her moorings in the river by ropes.' An American paper, dilating upon the success attained by a'self-mademan,' said he ' arrived in California twenty years ago with only one shirt to his back ;'and since then, has contrived, by close application to business, to accumulate over ten millions.'' President Taylor's celebrated bull : ' We are at peace with all the world, and continue to cherish relations of amity with the rest of mankind,' is pretty fairly matched by one perpetrated by an English theatrical paper, which, after announcing a forthcoming benefit performance, went on : ' Of course, every one mill he there, and for the edification of those who arc absent, a full report will be found in our next paper.' In our grandfathers' days, the hunting out of comical cross-readings was a favourite diversion of small witlings ; such things are only produced now by sheer accident, when, in ' making up' for the press, a poison of a column of type gets mysteriously imported into a place where it has no manner of business thereby causing things to become, as Yankees term it, considerably mixeL By the intrusion of the termination of a criminal trial into an operatic criticism, a panegyrical account of a new singer finished up with, ' he was sentenced to five years' penal servitude, so that society will for some time be freed from the infliction of his presence.' By part of a report of a public meeting straying into one about the accidents on a foggy night, it was made to appear that a ' Mr Hudson moved I he Brandy Quay into the water.' The Queen, everybody kuowe, is a good sailor,

but her appearance upon the quarter-deck as captain would certainly astonish the tars; yet the following item of Naval Intelligence once graced the columns of a morning paper: ' A review and mock-engagement of the gunboat flotilla will shortly take place in the presence of Her Majesty, appointed to succeed Captain G. T. Gordon, as flag-captain to Sir G. P. Seymour.' A weekly newspaper lately served up in this piece of hotch-potch: ' Yesterday a coal-porter named John Sharp was received into the chest on Friday evening. It appears that he had gone to the Royal Free Hospital, having received severe bruises about the Metropolitan Market, to purchase a horse, and seeing one to please him, he bought it; he took it home, and when in the act of examining it, the animal struck out and kicked him.' A country poper contrived to beat the above by dexterously combining a paragraph concerning an unlucky dog with another concerning a popular preacher ; ' The Rev. J. Thompson preached to a large congregation last Sunday. This was his last sermon previous to his departure for London. He exhorted his brethren and sisters ; and after offering a devout prayer, took a whim to cut some frantic freaks. He ran up the High street and down Queen street to the college. At this stage of the proceedings, some boys seized him, tied a tea-kettle to his tail, and let him go. A great crowd gathered, and for a few minutes there was a lively scene.' This was, however, nothing compared with what made the Rev Dr Mudge mad. The doctor had been presented with a goldheaded cane, and the same week a patent pig-killing and sausage-making machine had been tried at a factory in the place of which he was pastor. The writer of a report of the presentation and a description of fcke new machine for the local newspaper thus records the accident that ensued : ' The inconsiderate Caxtonian who made up the forms of the paper got the two locals mixed up in a frightful manner, and when we went to press, something like this was the appalling result: Several of the Rev Dr Mudge's friends called upon him yesterday, and after a brief conversation, the unsuspicious pig was seized by his hind legs and slid along a beam until he reached the hot-water tank. Hid friends explained the object of their visit, and presented him with a very handsome gold-headed butcher, who grabbed him by the tail, swung him rouud, slit his throat from ear to ear, and in less than a minute, the carcass was in the water. Thereupon, he came forward, and said that there were times when the feelings overpowered one, and for that reason he would not attempt to do more than thank those around him for the manner in which such a huge animal was cut into fragments was simply astonishing. The doctor concluded his remarks, when the machine seized him, and in less time than it taker to write it, the pig was cut into fragments, and worked up into delicious sausages. The occasion will long be remembered by the doctor's friends as one of the most delightful of their lives. The best pieces can be procured for tenpence a pound ; and we are sure that those who have sat so long under his ministry will rejoice that he has been treated so handsomely.' We cannot vouch for the genuiueness of the foregoing ; but whether it be genuine or manufactured, it would be difficult to find a more complete specimen of a typographical mixture. ♦ A LOAN FROM THE DEAD. [From " Chambers' Journal."] A good many years ago, the regiment to which I belonged was quartered at Aldershott. After a long absence from England, spent on a parching rock in the middle of the Red Sea, bleak and dreary Aldershott seemed a very paradise. It was delightfully near London too ; leave was easily to be obtained ; and a great part of my spare time, and more than all my spare money, was spent by me in the metropolis spent, I am ashamed to confess, in riotous living and much disorder. Still, had it only been that, I should, possibly, like many of my brotherofficers, at the cost of much subsequent pain, and weariness, and pinching, have passed through my cycle of dissipation, and settled down at last ; but, in addition to my youthful aberrations, I had a fatal predilection for games of skill and chance. I was the best whist-player in the regiment, and could hold my own with the crack players of the clubs ; and had I stuck to whist, which, in my belief, never ruined any man who had a head upon his shoulders, I could have made a decent income out of my skill; but my moderate winnings at whist were swallowed up, and much more lost besides, at unlimited 100, blind hookey, hazard, and other kindred games. To crown all, I took to backing horses, and lost at that, I need hardly say. A long run of evil luck beset me ; I had lost all my available funds, had mortgaged my commission to the utmost penny I could raise upon it, and found myself, at the end of the Epson week, fevered and parched in body, in soul wretched and despairing. I had come to the end of my tether; I was regularly done up ; life had nothing but evil in store for me. On the following week, I should be posted as a defaulter on the turf ; I should leave the army in disgrace : and such tidings would kill my old widowed mother.

It was Sunday night ; I had been in London, trying to raise money, but uselessly; the Jews closed their fists to me. I only wanted a hundred pounds to pay my Derby losses ; this achieved, I could sell out, and retire without open disgrace ; but I couldn't raise it. One man offered me fifty pounds for my bill of two hundred and fifty pounds at three months, but I wasn't quite so mad as to take that ; I might as well smash for a hundred as fifty.

My last sovereign was changed in paying my hotel bill on that Sunday night. I had a return ticket to Aldershott in my pocket, and a few shillidgs besides ; nothing else in the world in the way of available assets. I think if I had been possessed of a five-pound note, I should have gone down to| Liverpool, and taken a steerage passage to America. It was the limited extent of my means which made me resolve to go back to Aldershott, and appear on parade the next day. The clock iu fhe coffee-room where I was sitting shewed half-past eleven as the hour of the night ; the waiter only was in the room, arranging his spoons and napkins in the buffet, yawning surreptitiously every now and then, quite indifferent to the problems which were agitating me. Waterloo Bridge or Aldershott? I must make up my mind quickly : another five minutes, and it would be too late for the one ; the other was always open. ' Waiter, a Hansom 1 ' I shouted all of a sudden in a tone which made the man jump. To be continued.