Volume 2 — From Chamber's Journal. SLIPS OF THE PEN.

When Mrs. Caxton innocently made her wiser-half the father of an anachronism, that worthy scholar was much troubled in consequence. His anachronism was a living one, or he might have comforted himself by reflecting that greater authors than he had stood in the same paternal predicament. Our old English dramatists took tremendous liberties this way, never allowing considerations of time and place to stand in the way of any allusion likely to tell with their audience. Shakespeare would have been slow to appreciate a modern manager's anxiety for archaeological fidelity. His Greeks and Romans talk about cannons and pistols, and his Italian clowns are thorough cockneys, familiar with every nook and corner of London. And so it is with other caterers for the stage. Nat Lee talks about cards in his tragedy of "Hannibal;" Otway makes Spartan notables carouse and drink deep; Mrs. Cowley's Lacedaemonian king speaks of the night's still Sabbath; D'Urfey's ancient Britons are familiar with Puritans and packet-boats; and Rymer (though he set himself up for a critic) supplies a stage direction for the representative of his Saxon heroine to pull off her patches, when her lover desires her to lay aside her ornaments.

When Colman read "Inkle and Yarico" to Dr. Moseley, the latter exclaimed: "It won't do. Stuff! Nonsense!"—"Why?" asked the alarmed dramatist.—"Why, you say in the finale:

It won't do; there is but one bell in the island!" This mistake was excusable enough; but when Milton described

he must certainly have forgotten he had laid the scene of "Comus" in North Wales. Ernest Jones, describing a battle in his poem, "The Lost Army," says:

and some lines further on pictures his hero

thus making his battle rather a trial of the respective powers of ancient and modern weapons than a conflict between equally-armed foes. Mr. Thackeray perpetrates a nice little anachronism in "The Newcomes," when he makes Clive, in a letter dated 183-, quoting an Academy exhibition critique, ask: "Why have we no picture of the sovereign and her august consort from Smee's brush?"—the author, in his anxiety to compliment the artist, forgetting that there was no consort till 1840.

A bull in a china-shop is scarcely more out of place than a bull in a serious poem, but accidents will happen to the most regular of writers. Thus Milton's pen slipped when he wrote:

a quotation reminding us that the favorite citation,

is but a splendid bull, beautiful for its {273} boldness. Thomson was an adept at making pretty bulls; here is another:

as if it were possible to see some of them, although they were concealed. Pope, correct Pope, actually tell us:

The author of "The Spanish Rogue" makes "a silent noise" invade the ear of his hero. General Taylor immortalized himself by perpetrating one of the grandest bulls on record, in which he attained what a certain literary professor calls "a perfection hardly to be surpassed." In his presidential address he announced to the American Congress that the United States were at peace with all the world, and continued to cherish relations of amity with the rest of mankind. Much simpler was the blunder of an English officer, during the Indian mutiny, who informed the public, through the Times, that, thanks to the prompt measures of Colonel Edwardes, the Sepoys at Fort Machison "were all unarmed and taken aback, and, being called upon, laid down their arms." There was nothing very astonishing in an Irish newspaper stating that Robespierre "left no children behind him, except a brother, who was killed at the same time;" but it was startling to have an English journal assure us that her majesty Queen Victoria was "the last person to wear another man's crown."

A single ill-chosen word often suffices, by the suggestion of incongruous ideas, to render what should be sublime utterly ridiculous. One can hardly believe that a poet like Dryden could write:

Such a line would have come with better grace from the author of "The Courageous Turk," a play containing the following curious passage:

Nearly equalled in absurdity by this from Nat Lee's "OEdipus:"

When the news of Captain Cook's death at Owhyhee came to England, the poetasters, of course, hastened to improve the occasion, and one of the results of their enthusiasm was a monody commencing:

an opening sufficient to upset the gravity of the great navigator's dearest friend.

Addison lays it down as a maxim, that when a nation abounds in physicians it grows thin of people. Fillibuster Henninpen seems to have agreed with the essayist, or he would hardly have informed General Walker, in one of his dispatches, that "Doctors Rice and Wolfe died of the cholera, and Dr. Lindley sickened, after which the health of the camp visibly improved." Intentionally or not, the stout-hearted soldier suggests that the best way of getting rid of the cholera is to make short work of the doctors. Among the obituary notices in a weekly paper, not many months ago, there appeared the name of a certain publican, with the following eulogium appended to it: "He was greatly esteemed for his strict probity and steady conduct through life, he having been a subscriber to the 'Sunday Times' from its first number." This is a worthy pendant to Miss Hawkins's story of the undertaker writing to the corporation of London, "I am desired to inform the Court of Aldermen, Mr. Alderman Gill died last night, by order of Mrs. Gill;" and not far short, in point of absurdity, is Madame Tussand's announcement of the exhibition of the effigy of the notorious Palmer, "who was executed at Stafford with two hundred other celebrities." {274} The modern fashion of naming florists' flowers must be held responsible for the very dubious paragraph we extract from a gardening paper: "Mrs. Legge will be looked after; she may not be so certain as some, but she was nevertheless very fine in the early part of the season. Lady Popham is useful, one of the old-fashioned build, not quite round in the outline, but makes up well."

Thackeray seems to have had an intense dislike to the trouble of revision, for his popular works, especially those published periodically, abound in trivial mistakes, arising from haste, forgetfulness, and want of care. The novelist mortally wounds an old lady with a candle instead of a candlestick, and afterwards attributes her death to a stone staircase. Newcome senior is colonel and major at one and the same time; Jack Belsize is Jack on one page and Charles on another; Mrs. Raymond Gray, introduced as Emily, is suddenly rechristencd Fanny; and Philip Fermor on one occasion becomes transformed into the author's old hero, Clive. With respect to the last-mentioned gentleman, author and artist seem to have differed, for while Mr. Thackeray jests about Clive's beautiful whiskers and handsome moustaches, Mr. Doyle persists to the end in denying young Newcome's possession of those tokens of manhood.

It is not often that an author is satirical upon his own productions; but Charles Dickens has contrived to be so. Describing the old inns of the Borough, in his "Pickwick Papers," he says they are queer places, with galleries, passages, and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough "to furnish materials for a hundred ghost-stories, supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any. " How little could Boz have anticipated certain charming Christmas books witching the world a few years later! So, also, "American Notes," Mr. Jefferson Brick, and the transatlantic Eden lay unsuspected in the future, when he made Old Wellor suggest Mr. Pickwick's absconding to America till Dodson & Fogg were hung, and then returning to his native land and writing "a book about the 'Merrikens as 'ill pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough!"