Pulpit Misquotations.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 17, 23 April 1913, Page 57

Pulpit Misquotations.

Nothing vexes anyone who takes authorship seriously more than a misquotation, and what writer has not suffered tortures in this way? Pulpiteers and lecturers and popular journalists, and young men in a hurry are here sad offenders. To sit in church, as a member of a large congregation, and hear famous passages from famous poets or proph«t» like Caralyle and Wordsworth and-Rus-kin paraphrased and parodied becomes a very real and involuntary penance to a literary listener. Shakespeare must almost have turned in his grave, so to speak, when a glib popular extempore preacher came out with this appalling travesty of his words: —

“There Is a Providence that shapes our steps, • Rough hew them how we will." when he really wrote, of course, something far better: — “There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends."

“Hamlet,” above all plays, when we consider how often it has -been represented in public, and remember Irving's impersonation and the amount that has been written about it in England and Germany, not to mention other countries, should be at any rate well and widely known. But the slovenly parson, who will probably make a slovenly parish, does not always seem acquainted with the play. Even a doctor of divinity tripped gaily and confidsatly over these fatal “steps” not very long ago. And there is another celebrated verse in “Hamlet” which frequently also undergoes a slight eclipse: —

“There’s a Divinity doth hedge a Klug." Shakespeare, as a matter of fact, wrote: “There’s such Divinity doth hedge a King That treason can but peep to what it would.”

We have heard “fence/’ a far more otiose metaphor, employed as a substitute for “hedge”—a. “fence” that was an “offence” in every way. Tha worst transgressors, and a very common class, appear to be the men and women with a conspicuously accurate manner, but with most inaccurate minds and memories.—-F. W Orde Ward, in “Westminster Revie w.*’