GREAT AUTHORS’ BLUNDERS.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2686, 28 October 1881, Page 2

GREAT AUTHORS’ BLUNDERS.

Jn an article on the blunders of literary people regarding everyday matters, the “ New York World ” has the following respecting some of Ouida’s mistakes : But it is in some of her earlier .and more “ utter ” books that Ouida is seen at her best. In that immortal steeplechase in “ Under Two Flags ” the favourite is ridden out hunting, and fed with sugar at 3 a.m, on race day, his rider’s preparation for the event consisting in sitting up drinking till 5 o’clock. The bookmakers were so impressed by the appearance of the horses that they laid “ 14 to 7 ” on three different horses, “ 19 to 6 ” on a fourth, and “ 3 to 6 ” on a fifth, and then went bellowing, “ Take the field bar one!” [Let the arithmeticians of the S.C.J.C. figure this out.] The course was four miles and a half long and the forty-two leaps such as “no steward should have set.’’ The advantage of feeding the favorite on loaf sugar— Palstaff thought sugar made him longwinded, and a lump of it used to be given to plebeian duellists in olden times to nerve them for the fray—was soon made apparent, for after running at a pace which “ Epsom flat never eclipsed,” that noble animal “ galloped Up the straight run-in-alone,” which the evidently hadn’t got the matutinal wine out of his head—called “a close finish.’’ Nor was that rider less accomplished as an oarsman, for when a military crew challenged Gamhiidge, he “ helped them to. beat Cambridge without training an hour, except so far as hard rowing went.” Let us fancy the surprise of a University eight challenged to row the ~th Lancers, for “ love, good-will, and u gold cup.” But the Cambridge of

“Ouida’s” knowledge is a strange place, with “ oriel ” windows, tadpoles in October, and stiff lines of'hunting country covered with “oak fences and oxrails.” There one sees “ four oars pulling up and down” at the backs of the colleges with a “ long, lofty, slashing stroke.” This, in so far as it is intelligible, is not characteristic of Cambridge rowing, and the only “ lofty stroke” of which we remember hearing was rowed by an eminent Oxford oarsman, Verdant Green, who had been instructed his oar in deep and pull it without a jerk. It is rather surprising to read of “ stroke whispering in the ear of five,” but perhaps he had an unusually long slide, or a neck like a giraffe.