“The sun’s perpendicular rays Illumine the depths of the sea,” Here the flight of the poet, by some accident, stopped short, but Mansel, who never lost an occasion for fun, completed the stanza in the following facetious style:— “And the fishes beginning to sweat, Cried, ‘Goodness, how hot we shall be.’” That not very brilliant joke, “to lie—under a mistake,” is sometimes indulged in by the best writers. Witness the following. Byron says:— If, after all, there should be some so blind To their own good this warning to despise, Led by some tortuosity of mind Not to believe my verse and their own eyes, And cry that they the moral cannot find, I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies; Should captains the remark, or critics make, They also lie too—under a mistake. _Don Juan_, Canto I. Shelley, in his translation of the _Magico Prodigioso_ of Calderon, makes Clarin say to Moscon:— You lie—under a mistake— For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man’s face. I now Say what I think. And De Quincey, _Milton versus Southey and Landor_, says:— You are tempted, after walking round a line (of Milton) threescore times, to exclaim at last,—Well, if the Fiend himself should rise up before me at this very moment, in this very study of mine, and say that no screw was loose in that line, then would I reply: “Sir, with due submission, you are——.” “What!” suppose the Fiend suddenly to demand in thunder. “What am I?” “Horribly wrong,” you wish exceedingly to say; but, recollecting that some people are choleric in argument, you confine yourself to the polite answer—“That, with deference to his better education, you conceive him to lie”—that’s a bad word to drop your voice upon in talking with a friend, and you hasten to add—“under a slight, a _very_ slight mistake.” Mr. Montague Mathew, who sometimes amused the House of Commons, and alarmed the Ministers, with his _brusquerie_, set an ingenious example to those who are at once forbidden to speak, and yet resolved to express their thoughts. There was a debate upon the treatment of Ireland, and Mathew having been called to order for taking unseasonable notice of the enormities attributed to the British Government, spoke to the following effect:—“Oh, very well; I shall say nothing then about the murders—(_Order, order!_)—I shall make no mention of the massacres—(_Hear, hear! Order!_)—Oh, well; I shall sink all allusion to the infamous half-hangings—”(_Order, order! Chair!_)