Some of the translations of the Italian operas in the librettos, which are sold to the audience, are ludicrous enough. Take, for instance, the lines in _Roberto il diavolo_,— Egli era, dicessi Abitatore Del tristo Imperio. Which some smart interpreter rendered— “For they say he was A citizen of the black emporium.” Misquotations. In Mr Collins’ account of Homer’s Iliad, in Blackwood’s _Ancient Classics for English Readers_, occurs the following:— ... “The spirit horsemen who rallied the Roman line in the great fight with the Latins at Lake Regillus, the shining stars who lighted the sailors on the stormy Adriatic, and gave their names to the ship in which St. Paul was cast away.” If the reader will take the trouble to refer to the _Acts of the Apostles_, xxviii. 11. he will find, that the ship of Alexandria, “whose sign was Castor and Pollux,” was not the vessel in which St. Paul was shipwrecked near Malta, but the ship in which he safely voyaged from the island of “the barbarous people” to Puteoli for Rome. The misquotations of Sir Walter Scott have frequently attracted attention. One of the most unpardonable occurs in _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_, chapter xlvii.:— “The least of these considerations always inclined Butler to measures of conciliation, in so far as he could accede to them, without compromising principle; and thus our simple and unpretending heroine had the merit of those peacemakers, to whom it is pronounced as a benediction, that they shall _inherit the earth_.” On turning to the gospel of Matthew, v. 9, we find that the benediction pronounced upon the _peacemakers_ was that “they shall be called the children of God.” It is the meek who are to “inherit the earth,” (ver. 5). Another of Scott’s blunders occurs in _Ivanhoe_. The date of this story “refers to a period towards the end of the reign of Richard I.” (chap. i.) Richard died in 1199. Nevertheless, Sir Walter makes the disguised Wamba style himself “a poor brother of the Order of St. Francis,” although the Order was not founded until 1210, and, of course, the saintship of the founder had a still later date. Again in _Waverley_ (chap. xii.) he puts into the mouth of Baron Bradwardine the words “nor would I utterly accede to the objurgation of the _younger Plinius_ in the fourteenth book of his _Historia Naturalis_.” The great Roman naturalist whose thirty-seven books on Natural History were written eighteen centuries ago, was the _Elder_ Pliny. Alison, in his _History of Europe_, speaks of the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, the Viceroy of Poland, as the son of the emperor Paul I. and the celebrated empress Catherine. This Catherine was the _mother_ of Paul, and wife of Peter III., Paul’s father. Constantine’s mother, i.e. Paul’s wife, was a princess of Würtemberg.