Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta
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Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature: A Melange of Excerpta
Literary curiosa; Literature -- Dictionaries
Lord Brougham was fond of relating an instance 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 but water-tight; 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 reported 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; whereupon that worthy
set himself right with his readers by stating that he willingly 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 exhilarated condition as his
American brother, who ended his account of a city banquet with the frank
admission: “It is not distinctly remembered by anybody present who made
the last speech!”
In a poem on the “Milton Gallery,” by Amos Cottle, the poet, describing
the pictures of Fuseli, says:—
“The lubber fiend outstretched the chimney near,
Or sad Ulysses on the larboard Steer.”
Ulysses steered to the larboard to shun Charybdis, but the compositor
makes him get upon the back of the bullock, the left one in the drove!
After all, however, he only interprets the text literally. “Steer,” as a
substantive, has no other meaning than bullock. The substantive of the
verb “to steer” is steerage. “He that hath the steerage of my course,”
says Shakspeare. The compositor evidently understood that Ulysses rode
an ox; he would hardly else have spelt Steer with a capital S.
The following paragraphs, intended to have been printed separately, in a
Paris evening paper, were by some blunder so arranged that they read
consecutively:—
Doctor X. has been appointed head physician to the Hospital de la
Charite. Orders have been issued by the authorities for the immediate
extension of the Cemetery of Mont Parnasse. The works are being executed
with the utmost dispatch.
The old story of Dr. Mudge furnishes one of the most curious cases of
typographical accident on record. The Doctor had been presented with a
gold-headed 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 the machine, for the local paper, is thus made to “mix
things miscellaneously:”—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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