SOME LITERARY SLIPS.

Otago Witness, Issue 972, 5 September 1889, Page 31

SOME LITERARY SLIPS.

There are very few authors in the pages of whose works slips of one kind or another have not been detected. Most of these errors are made in the course of references to scientific facts with which the writers are imperfectly acquainted. : For instance, Mr Walter Besant, as 1 has been lately pointed out, causes, in his 11 Children of Gibeon," a new moon r to rise in the east in the middle of the night, or rather at 2 o'clock in the morning. Again, Mr Eider Haggard, in the pages of " King Solomon's Mines " makes an eclipse of the moon take] place at the new moon instead of at the full, when the earth is between the sun and the moon. Even the mighty Milton has stumbled, Mark Pattinson says that the great Puritan's reference in " Arcades " to the elm as " The branching elm star-proof" is an arrant cockneyism. The elm is, he avers, one of " the thinnest foliaged trees of the forest. 1 ' ; Poets are, of course, frequent offenders, even beyond the legitimate bounds of poetic license.

There is, for example, the verse in the " Burial of Sir John Moore," with which every schoolboy is familiar : — We buried him darkly at dead of night, The sods with our bayonets turning, By the struggling moonbeams' misty light, And the lantern dimly burning.

Now, the Irish Astronomer Eoyal, Sir Robert Ball, has been making calculations, and he finds that the moon oould not possibly have been shining, either strongly or in glimmering fashion, at the time of the famous soldier's burial. The moon at the hour in question had been long below the horizon.

How many poet 3, too, have talked about being " up with the lark," and have exalted this cheerful songster as a moral of early rising? — all in the face of the facts of natural history, for the greenfinch, the blackcap, the quail, the blackbird, the thrush, the robin, the wren, the house spar* row, and the tomtit are all, a French ornithologist says, up in the morning before the lark begins to bestir itself.

Some poets slip through careless reading of their work. Professor Aytoun, who occupied at one time the chair of English literature at Edinburgh University, has, for instance, the following line in his well-known •• Edinburgh after Flodden," " O, the blackest day for Scotland that she ever itneTo before"

Even "Eobinson Crusoe" has had holes picked in it. The critics of Defoe's time used to ask the author how Crusoe managed to stuff his pockets with biscuits when he had taken off all his clothes before swimming to the wreck.

Further, how could he have been at such a loss for clothes (after those he had put off were washed away by the tide) when he had the ship's stores to. choose from ? And how could he have seen the goat's eyes ia the cave when ifc was pitch dark?' Also, how could the Spaniards give Friday's father an agreement in writing when they had neither paper nor ink ? Moreover, how , did Friday come to know so intimately the habits of bears, the bear not being a denizen of the West Indian Islands ? •

Trollope, in one of his most successful novels, has the wonderful statement, " Who should come whistling up the street, with a cigar in his mouth, but bis new friend, Andy Scott."

Charles Dickens, in two places at least, uses the word " mother-in-law " for " stepmother," He also speaks of rooks building in towers, and of Mr Squeers setting his boys to hoe turnips in winter..

' Ouida's "books 1 are full of inconsistencies, and Miss Braddon writes far too "many novels to turn them ,out' faultless. ' In " Out' by the. County," Miss Braddon makes'herhero say at page! 50, ".I dropped in at the' bank as we drove to the station and got four hundred' in notes. I used to carry circular notes^ but I have found of late years that your British bank note will pass current in most parts of the Continent." Yet on page 69 the same character observes. " The money is there in the cabinet — four hundred in circular notes, and we can have plenty more when that is spent."