QUOTING AND MISQUOTING.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4605, 23 December 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

QUOTING AND MISQUOTING.

(From the Philadelphia Ledger.) " With just enough of learning to misquote," is one of the stinging lines in Byron's " British Bards and Scotch Reviews." This was a fair retort upon the censorious critics, against whom it was directed ; but as to general readers it would be very unfair to charge an absence of learning or culture upon them because of a failure to recite the thought or sentiment of an author on all occasions with precise verbal accuracy. To enable themselves to do this they would be obliged to burden their memories with words and phrases to the exclusion of more important subjects, and all for a purpose which can be served quite as well by reference to the author's books, or to some handibook. When making such references in conversation, strict verbal accuracy ought not to be required; but when writing for publication, it is unquestionably the right practice to verify whatever quotation is to be used, wherever it is practicable to do so. The observance of this habit tends to keep our classic quotations free from corruption, and the neglect of it tends to what has occurred and will continue to occur—the twisting of terse and apt expressions out of shape and meaning. The last-mentioned casualty has happened to a saying attributed to Walpole, "All men have their price." There is no evidence, that we know of, that he either said this or meant it ; but there is evidence in Coxe's "Memoirs of Walpole," that he held certain professed patriots of his day in low esteem, and that, alluding to them, he said, "All those men have their price." This is quite a different thing from the cynical and demoralising sentiment attributed to him in the much-abused and almost universal misquotation referred to. On the other hand, some of the popular forms of what purport to be quotations from well-known authors exhit improvements in expressiveness and epigrammatic force. There aro very few people unfamiliar with the phrase applied to office-holders, " Few die, and none resign." This is attributed to Jefferson, but is somewhat better than the way he put it. What he said about official vacancies was this :—" Those by death are few ; by resignation none." Here the popular form is a manifest improvement; yet who can name the person who was the author of the quotation as it now stands ? Additional vigour has been given in the same way to a saying of Josiah Quincey, who, in opposing tho Louisiana purchase, argued in Congress that if the bill should pass it would work a virtual dissolution of the Union, and that it would be the duty of some of the free States to definitely prepare for a separation, " amicably, if they can ; violently, if they must." The popular form of this, derived from Henry Clay's misquotation of it, is:—" Peaceably, if we can ; forcibly, if wo must" a much more muscular diction. Under the same process, a wider popular use and understanding has been given to the first line of Walter Scott's couplet: " Sleep tho sloop that knows not bro&khig, Morn of toil, nor night of waking." Almost uniformly this is repeated, " sleeps the sleep that knows no waking." Somo corrupted quotations of another class are simply unchallenged errors without material harm, except that the purity of the original is lost. Of this description is Bishop Berkeley's lino, " Westward the course of empire takes its way," which is most frequently repeated in a form for which Mr. Bancroft, tho historian, is Baid to bo accountable—viz., " Westward the star of empire takes its way." In the same category wo may placo the phrase " Beauty unadorned is adorned the most," which is a short and easy way of referring to what Thomson put in this form: — Loveliness Needs not the foreign aid of ornament, But is, when unadorned, adorned tho most. In this instance tho popular form, as we think, is not an improvement. So, too, the frequent expression, " where thero's a will there's a way," (while very terse and strong loses somethiug of tho wider meaning of what appears to bo tho original in George Crabbe's line, "Be there a will and wisdom tads away." There are some changes of quotation too, about which little can bo said except that they aro changes. Thus, Matthew Prior's lino, " Fine by degrees and beautifully less "—usually I comes to us as "Small bydegrees," &c; Shaks.

pere's, " The man that hath no music in himself " very often appears as " the man that hath no music in his soul," and his maxim that " The better part of valor is discretion" appears five times out of six in the inverted form in which later writers have misquoted it. But there is a great deal of quoting done almost unconsciously by the use of phrases that have gone into a body of our everyday language, the phrases being used without a thought on the part of the speakers as to their origin. Some of those are from Shakspere, and more from the English Bible. All of the following familiar phrases are from Shakspere : " Fast and loose," " I know a trick woith two of that," " Poor, but honest," " The short and the long of it," " That was laid on with a trowel," " Some of us will smart for it," "Masters, spread yourselves," "My cake is dough," "As good luck would have it." These are used in scores of ways, without the slightest thought of where they come from. From the Bible we get " Escaped with the skin of my teeth," "The root of the matter," "The pen of a ready writer," " At their wit's end," " Fearfully and wonderfully made," " Merchant princes" (in Isaiah, however, it is " whose merchants arc princes"), " A feast of fat things," "The burden and heat of the day," "Absent in body but present in spirit," and even " Spreading himself like a green baytree." There are many other phrases unconsciously quoted from those great sources of expressive and vigorous English, but it would carry us too far to follow them further at this time. So we may close this with a reference to one very frequently misquoted passage from Genesis : "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." How many times, 1 too, we find this repeated, both in conversation and in print, in other words than those of the English translation—" the sweat of the brow " being nearly always used instead of "the sweat of thy face."