LITERARY BLUNDERS

Evening Star, Issue 18137, 29 November 1922, Page 2

LITERARY BLUNDERS

SOME STARTLING MISPRINTS. How often has an aotiior to mourn ovef somo tiresome slip in proof-reaßmg Hu writing may not be of. the best, . J* n«• »«s often to -write very quickly and Ivumedlj, and printers find fhcnl^ his script, arid print “fools or fowl* and “noses” for “roses. Pit; the soi rows of a printer who receives suck letter* as come to mo at time*. 4 very slight mistake may cause a ter* rible blunder. The omission of a stop of , its misplacement, or the transposition of a letter or the leaving out of one, may produce sad results. A writer was sounding a nanegyrio of Milton, and wrote of his “ iLnortal works.” Unfortunately _he left out the “ I,” and was inclined to sink into his grave when he read in hia boo-c “immoral works”—the last thing thaj Milton could be accused of writing. _ Rut ibis writer was not alone in his niis-lor-tune. Standen, in his preface to u* Watts's ‘ Horse Lyric®,’ exclaimed : With thought sublime And high sonorous words thou sweetly eing’st To thy Immoral lyre. The following statement in a Hampshire paper must have- aroused the excitement and anger of the enemies of the anslocracy when they read this: Sir Robert Peel and a parly of fiends were engaged in shooting peasants at Drayton Manor. at the wedding. A fashionable reporter of _ a wedding once recorded that “the bride was ao companied to the altar by tight bridesmams.” Tho substitution of t for “e”—what a scandal it was answoraolo for! The pages of ‘ Punch ’ are often brightened by blunders quoted from tho daily Press, especially from the advertisement columns; bnt these are too laminar to our readers to be quoted here. ori once suffered from a misprint. In Uiilde Harold’ he has a fine passage in which the Mediterranean is apostrophised in the words: Thy shores are empires, changed in all ’save thee— M Assyria, Greece, Rome, Cartilage, ’what •arc they? ,„ Thy waters wasted them while they ’ were free, And many a tyrant since. Probably you will so find the passage printed in your own copy of the poet’s work. But when did the ocean waves destroy or waste these countries? Not long ago'a critic asked himself that_ question, and began to suspect a misprint. He was right. Ho consulted the original manuscript, and found that, instead of wasted, the correct reading was wash’d. The Holy Bible has often suffered from misprints. There was tho Wicked Bible,” printed by tho King’s Printers, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, in the reign of Charles, in which tho word not was omitted in tho Seventh Commandment. This was in the edition of 16.i1. The printers were lined £3,000 for their carelessness. In the 1634 edition tlie word no was left out of the first verso of the 14th Psalm, which appeared in the form ; “ Tlie fool hath said in his heart there is God.” It is possible’ that some of those blunders wore made intentionally by knavish printers. In one of Field’s Bibles tho word not was omitted in the 9th voreo of chapter vi. of I. Corinthians, making it read: “Know yo not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?” REVISING THE BIBLE, The widow of a German printer was a strange defender of “ woman’s rights. She objected strongly to the supremacy of husbands, and decided to revise the text of the passage in the Bible which speaks of the subjection ot ‘wives (Genesis iii., 16). So she visited the Mice in the middle of the night and altered the German word Herr, meaning lord, into Narr, signifying fool. Hence the verse ran: “He shall be thy fool.”. For this act it is said that she suffered the penalty of death. At Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, some lively once changed the letterv ’’ into a“k’’ in the Prayer Book marriage service, making the question addressed to the bridegroom read: “ Wilt thou love her . . . and, forsaking all other, keep thee unto her as long a.s ye both shall like?” thus establishing a freedom of contract that would not be dissimilar to certain American notions of divorce. Everyone lias lieard of tho “ Vinegar Bible” (a.p. 1717), so named because “The Parable of tho Vineyard” appeared as “ The Parade of the Vinegar.” The first line of tlie Old' Hundredth once appeared as: All people that on earth do well," which seemed to invito only tho rich and prosperous folk to “sing with cheerful voice." “KICKED" FOR “KISSED.” No branches of literature seem to have been free from these perverse errors. Report a kites that a printer converted the charming description of an episode in a novel, ‘Mi® kissed her under silent stars.” into “he kicked her under the cellar stairs.” Someone once quoted from the ‘ Essay on Man,’ and prefaced tho quotation with “as the Pope says.” Foreign writers are just as unfortunate as our own. The Gorman word Maxichen, meaning girl, is something like Machten, signifying Powers. Thus a Prussian scribe who wanted to state that Bismarck endeavored to keep on good terms with all the Powers was made to say: “Prince Bismarck is trying to keep up honest and straightforward relations with all the girls.” But the subject of literary blunders is inexhaustible, and tho consideration of them cannot bo here prolonged. Tlie moral is: Road timr proofs very carefully; better still, entrust them to'a careful and accurate literary friend. So will you escape from much annoyance.—Rev. H. Ditehfield, in ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly.’