AUTHOR’S ERRORS

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 155, 27 March 1926, Page 22

AUTHOR’S ERRORS

SOME AMUSING LAPSES

The list of. mistakes made by authors is a long one. Historians, poets, and novelists have been equally guilty 1 philosophers and men of science have also gone astray amidst their strivings for accuracv. But these mistakes, though humiliating to the authors concerned. have contributed to the gaiety of nations. What, for instance, could have been more exhilarating to the student of Alison’s “History of Europe” than to come across the information ' that Sir Peregrine Pickle was one of the pall bearers at the funeral of the great Duke of Wellington? It was Sir Peregrine Maitland whom Alison meant, and he was so certain that the mistake / ■ was not his that he let loose his, fury on the printer when the mistake' was discovered. But reference to the manuscript absolved the printer; Alison s mind, while intent on facts, had wandered into the field of fiction. Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle as a pall beare at the great Duke’s funeral is a spectacle that appeals to our sense of huh°Macaulay had. a pas‘ ,!on _ f °L aC but in attacking Rev. G. R..Gleig“Life of Warren Hastings” he wrote in the "Edinburgh Review ’’: It: would be uniust to estimate Goldsmith by the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ or Scott by the > ‘Life of Napoleon ’ ” What he mean to condemn was not the- Y.'Sjlfnrv Wakefield,” but Goldsmiths Histon of Greece.” A correction, was made three months later in the next issue of the "Review,” but Macaulay was so upset at being regarded during that interval as a critic who had condemned the" Vicar of Wakefield” he endeavoured to get the editor of the Review” to publish a special number, so that the correction could be made imrnrdThi’ere, the French historian, in describing one of Napoleon s battles, wrote, “Throughout thi day torrent, of rain poured down and twenty thousand Austrians bit the dust. Ju’eTroplong, a French legal historian, wrote in his pompous style, In. the midst of many crumbling institutions, that of property stands erect on its feet, seated upon justice ” Carlvle’s “History of the French Revolution? is full of errors, but one of the worst of them was the account of the sinking of the Vengeur in the battle off Brest on June 1, 1794, between the English fleet under Admiral Lord Howe and the French fleet under Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse. “Twelve hours' of raging cannonade; sun now sinking through the battle smoke; six French ships taken, the ■ battle lost; what ship soever can still sail, making off!” wrote Carlvle. “'But how is it with that Vengeur ship; she neither strikes nor makes off ? She is lamed, she cannot make off; strike she will not. Fire rakes her fore and aft from victorious enemies; the Vengeur is sinking. Strong are ye, tyrants of the sea; vet we also, are we weak? Lot all flags, streamers, jacks, every rag of tri-colour that will yet run on rope, fly rustling aloft; the whole crew crowds to the upper deck; ■ and with universal soul-maddening yell, shouts, ‘Vive la Republique’ — sinking, sinking. She staggers, she lurches, her last drink whirl; ocean yawns abysmal; down rushes the Vengeur carrving ‘Vive la Republique’ along with her, unconquerable, into eternity.’ But the Vengeur did not

sink until some hours after the battle, and in the meantime some hunureas of her crew had been rescued by British boats. The captain of the Vengeur was lunching aboard a Britisii ship when his own vessel went down. There was no dramatic defiance by the crew as she plunged to eternity. in a later edition, Carlyle added a paragraph explaining how historians (himself include!) had been misled by the false account of the sinking of the \ engeiir given to the National Convention by the patriotic’ Deputy Bertrand Barrere de Vieuzac. Of this extremely, picturesque account, Carlyle wrote m the revised edition of his “French Rcvoluftion”: “This same enormous inspiring feat turns out to be an eno -mous inspiring nonentity, extant nowhere save as falsehood in the brain of Barrere. Believed, bewept, besting by the whole French people to this hour, it may be regarded as Barrere’s masterpiece; the largest, most inspiring piece of humbug manufactured for some centuries by any man or nation.” There are numerous sfnall errors in well-known novels. In Chapter VIII “Vanity Fair” Becky Sharp writes to Amelia Sedley. “Sir Bitt is not what we silly girls, when we used to read ‘Cecilia’ at Chiswick, imagined a baronet must have been Anything indeed less like Lord Orville cannot be imagined.” But Lord Orville is not one of the characters in Fanny Burney’s “Cecilia”; he appears in th it author’s “Evilina.” In “Don Quixote’ the party at the Crescent tavern sit down to supper twice in the same evening without the author being aware of i:. Charles Kingsley in “Westward Ho!” makes John Brumblecombe read from the Prayer Book the prayer for “all sorts and conditiois of men,” thorgli at that time the prayer was not included in the Prayer Book. Longfellow’s poem on “The Wreck of the Hesperus” has been proved to be a stirring account of something that never happened, and Tennyson’s “Charge of tlje Light Brigade” owes its inspiration to Tennyson’s ignore of the facts. There was no trumpet call for the charge; the command was given by word of mouth From the military point of view the charge was useless; it accomplished nothing but the destruction of the gallant regiment that carried it out. The difference between Tennyson’s account and the account of those who took part in it is more than the difference between poetrv and prose. The late Lord Tredegar, who was one of the officers who rode in the charge, gave an inquirer the following prosaic of it “There’s nothing to tell. .We rode down the valley. I was too busy controlling my horse to think of anything else. 'When -we got to the guns the Russian gunners got under t*em. We couldn’t sabre them, so we rode back again. That’s all. Tennyson’s story is rubbish.” , Gray’s “Elegy m a Country Churchyard” contains more mistakes than can be covered by police license:. In • the opening line, "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,’ there: are two mistakes. The curfew was not a slow tolling sound, but a clear rapid ring, intended as a warning. And c “ r “j. w was not rung at the parting of the day, but some hours after night-mll—-long after the ploughman had plodded his weary way homewards.—Melbourne "Age.”.