THE DEVIL AND HIS WORKS.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1896, 30 January 1875, Page 3

THE DEVIL AND HIS WORKS.

The printer, sometimes causes" such curious felicities of style that it is hard to believe that they are unintentional. It seems quite right for a locomotive to cut a cow into calves, and when the editor of the Chimney, Corner informed a correspondent who allied to be tolci of a "public/ ation that will soot?' ytiu in the Chimney Corner." It was during, the American war that a western paper said the army was in want of consecrated beef, and dpsecratejd :V<?getabl6s;! and about the ■same' time a gigantic headline, " The British Lion Skating his Mane!" was spread before the astonished world as "The British Lion; Skating in Mane!" Lord Brougham once referred to " the masses," but the Times report made him say " them asses." So good a political weapon as, a misprint did not escape the grasp of Mr " Punch," who in 1840 printed this pungent paragraph :—"Erratum in ihe Times. For f though Sir; Robert Pe,el is the ostensible head, the Duke of Wellington holds the reins of the present administration,' read, 'the Duke of Wellington holds the brains of the present administration.'" "In a Garden," is easily read " Enoch Arden," but few would believe "RaY and Fried "to be the misprint of a German compositor for " Aurora Floyd." "So very human was printed in ihe Times "So very heinous." In an American catalogue one of Dickens' novels was announced as j" Barney, byl Budge." A pretty comedy called " Blighted Troth " was damned because the playbill of its first performance was headed flighted Froth." If M. Sardou reads the papers he must by this time -be accustomed to seeing himseif; called "The popular Parisian playright, Mons. Sardine." Ihe keen- critic of the New York Tribune once spoke of a certain English actress as '- one of those long-limbed, two-headed inanities of which the British Isles are so prolific; " and when that sentence was quoted in a letter to the London Figaro, the writer was horrified to find himself calling a certain blonde beauty "one of those lazy-limbed, *wo-headed inanities of which the British Isles are so prolific.'' A Chicago paper recently.said, "At the commencement of the second scene King of Terrors made his first appearance," which would lead one to believe that grisly Death had been a visitor to; the"entertainment; but upon examination it appears that Terrors should be Tenors. A very comical sentence was recently found in .the programme of a concert given in London by M. Gound—- " Song, ■• She Wandered down the Mountain Side' accompanied by tho composer; " and at another^concert a young lady was announced to sing "the favorite song, • An Angl's Whisker;'" Editors should go to heaven, they have enough to the " devil" in this world. Many of the blunders found in the daily press are due to the writers rather than the printers. Editors dashing off a hurried article often make bulls. The Daily Telegraph paid that the Russian fleet was going to the Black Sea " to take part in the autumn manoeuvres next summer." A Bengal editor, writing in favor of the income-tax, hoped " that the Government would not repeat the blunder of killing the calf that laid the golden eggs;" a mixture of metaphor only equalled by the Vermont clergyman who took charge of the local paper for a, week, and began a religious article, " When we look back upon the untrodden paths of the future we behold- the footprints of an Almighty hand." The advertisements arc often as amusing as the professedly "funny column." Witness this: "A spinster, particularly fond of children, informs the^ public that she wishes to adopt two or three, having none of her own!" And this: "Maria 8., wife of Henry 8., Esq., aged eighty years. She lived with her husband fifty years, and died in the confident hope of a better life." Perhaps she was a visitor of the hotel "to be kept by the widow of Mr ——, who died last summer on* a new and improved plan." And perhaps If tlie wife had died instead of the husband, his biographer would, be horrified to find his " He was hardly able to bear the demise of his wife" altered into "He was hardly 'able to wear the chemise of his wife."

But this is surpassed by the message sent.by a telegraph operator to a physician " Come at once to see procession of Carrie Spencer's menagerie ; " when it was repeated it read, " Come at once with prescripion. Case of cerebro-spinal meningitis.