Literary Blunders Part 7

[9] Collier's MS. corrector subst.i.tuted _farc'd_ for _forc'd_.

The word _forced_ should be read _farced_, the letter _o_ having evidently dropped down into _a_ box. The enemy's ranks were not _forced_ with Macbeth's followers, but _farced_ or filled up. In Murrell's _Cookery_, 1632, this identical word is used several times; we there see that a farced leg of mutton was when the meat was all taken out of the skin, mixed with herbs, etc., and then the skin filled up again.

'I come to thee for charitable license . . .

To booke our dead.'

_Henry V_., iv. 7.

So all the copies, but 'to book' is surely a modern commercial phrase, and the

Herald here asked leave simply to 'look,'

or to examine, the dead for the purpose of giving honourable burial to their men of rank. In the same sense Sir W. Lucie, in the First Part of _Henry VI_., says:--

'I come to know what prisoners thou hast tane, And to survey the bodies of the dead.'

We cannot imagine an officer with pen, inkhorn, and paper, at a period when few could write, 'booking' the dead. We may, I think, take it for granted that here the letter _b_ had fallen over into the _l_ box.''

Another point to bear in mind is the existence of such logotypes as _fi_, _si_, etc., so that, as Mr. Blades says, ''the change of light into sight must not be considered as a question of a single letter--of _s_ in the _l_ box,'' because the box containing _si_ is far away from the _l_ box, and their contents could not well get mixed.

To these instances given by Mr. Blades may be added a very interesting correction suggested to the author some years ago by a Shakespearian student. When Isabella visits her brother in prison, the

cowardly Claudio breaks forth in complaint, and paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the d.a.m.ned:--

''Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the _delighted spirit_ To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling!--'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death.''

_Measure for Measure_, act iii., sc. 1.

We have here, in the expression ''delighted spirit,'' a difficulty which none of the commentators have as yet been able to explain. Warburton said that the adjective meant ''accustomed to ease and delights,'' but this was not a very successful guess, although Steevens adopted it. Sir Thomas Hanmer altered _delighted_ to _dilated_, and Dr. Johnson

mentions two suggested emendations, one being _benighted_ and the other _delinquent_. None of these suggestions can be corroborated by a reference to the plans of the printers' cases, but it will be seen that the one now proposed is much strengthened by the position of the boxes in those plans. The suggested word is _deleted_, which accurately describes the spirits as destroyed, or blotted out of existence. The word is common in the printing office, and it was often used in literature.

If we think only of the recognised spelling of the word _delighted_ we shall find that there are three letters to alter, but if we take the older spelling, _delited_, the change is very easily made, for it will be noticed that the letters in the _i_ box might easily tumble over into the _e_ box.

There is a very curious description of h.e.l.l in Bede's _Ecclesiastical History_, where the author speaks of ''deformed spirits''

who leap from excess of heat to cutting cold, and it is not improbable that Shakespeare may have had this pa.s.sage in his

mind when he put these words into the mouth of Claudio.[10]

[10] An article on this point will be found in _The Antiquary_, vol. viii. (1883), p. 200.

It is taken for granted that the compositor is not likely to put his hand into the wrong box, so that if a wrong letter is used, it must have fallen out of its place.

An important cla.s.s of misprints owes its origin to this misplacement; but, as noticed by Mr. Blades, there are other cla.s.ses, such as misspellings caused by the compositor's ignorance or misunderstanding. We must remember that the printer has to work fast, and if he does not recognise a word he is very likely to turn it into something he does understand.

Thus the t.i.tle of a paper in the _Philosophical Transactions_ was curiously changed in an advertis.e.m.e.nt, and the Calamites, a species of fossil plants of the coal measures, with but slight change appeared as ''The True Fructification of Calamities.'' This is a blunder pretty sure to be made, and within a few days of writing this, the author has seen a refer

ence to ''Notes on some Pennsylvanian Calamities.'' As an instance of less excusable ignorance, we shall often find the word _gauge_ printed as _guage_.

One of the slightest of misprints was the cause of an odd query in the second series of _Notes and Queries_, which, by the way, has never yet been answered. In John Hall's _Hor

I have hunted after it in many dictionaries without avail. It means, I suppose, antagonism or contest, and resembles in form many Anglo-Saxon words which never found their way into English proper.''

The blunder was not discovered, and another correspondent wrote: ''The word andwar would surely modernise into _hand-

war_. Is not andirons (handirons) a parallel word of the same genus?' In the General Index we find ''Andwar, an old English word.'' So much for the long life of a very small blunder.

A very similar blunder to this of ''andwar'' occurs in _Select Remains of the learned John Ray with his Life by the late William Derham_, which was published in 1760 with a dedication to the Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, signed by George Scott. In Derham's Life of Ray a list of books read by Ray in 1667 is printed from a letter to Dr. Lister, and one of these is printed ''The Business about great Rakes.'' Mr. Scott must have been puzzled with this t.i.tle; but he was evidently a man not to be daunted by a difficulty, for he added a note to this effect: ''They are now come into general use among the farmers, and are called _drag rakes_.'' Who would suspect after this that the t.i.tle is merely a misprint, and that the pamphlet refers to the proceedings of Valentine Greatrakes, the famous stroker, who claimed equal power

with the kings and queens of England in curing the king's evil? This blunder will be found uncorrected in Dr. Lankester's _Memorials of John Ray_, published by the Ray Society in 1846, and does not seem to have been suspected until the Rev.

Richard Hooper called attention to it a short time ago in _Notes and Queries_.[11]

[11] Seventh Series, iv. 225.

An amusing instance of the invention of a new word was afforded when the printer produced the words ''a noticeable fact in thisms'' instead of ''this MS.''

The misplacement of a stop, or the transposition of a letter, or the dropping out of one, will make sad havoc of the sense of a pa.s.sage, as when we read of the _immoral_ works of Milton. It was, however, a very complimentary misprint by which it was made to appear that a certain town had a remarkably high rate of _morality_. In the address to Dr. Watts by J. Standen prefixed to that author's _Hor

''With thought sublime And high sonorous words, thou sweetly sing'st To thy _immoral_ lyre.''

On another page of this same book Watts' ''daring flight'' is transposed to _darling flight_.

In Miss Yonge's _Dynevor Terrace_ a portion of one word was joined on to another with the awkward result that a young lady is described ''without stretched arms.''

The odd results of the misplacement of stops must be familiar to most readers; but it is not often that they are so serious as in the following instances. William Sharp, the celebrated line engraver, believed in the Divine mission of the madman Richard Brothers, and engraved a portrait of that worthy with the following inscription beneath it: ''Fully believing this to be the man appointed by G.o.d, I engrave his likeness.--W. SHARP.'' The writing engraver by mistake put the comma after the word appointed, and omitted it at the latter part of the sentence, thus giving a ludicrous effect to the whole inscription. Many impressions were struck off before the

mistake was discovered and rectified. The question of an apostrophe was the ground of a civil action a few years ago in Switzerland; and although the anecdote refers to a ma.n.u.script, and not to a printed doc.u.ment, it is inserted here because it ill.u.s.trates the subject. A gentleman left a will which ended thus: ''Et pour tmoigner gue

Several misprints are always recurring, such as the mixture of the words Topography and Typography, and Biography with Bibliography. In the prospectus of an edition of the _Waverley Novels_ we read: ''The aim of the publishers has been to make it pre-eminent, by beauty of _topography_ and ill.u.s.tration, as an _dition de luxe_.''

Andrew Marvell published a book which

he ent.i.tled _The Rehearsal Transprosed_; but it is seldom that a printer can be induced to print the t.i.tle otherwise than as _The Rehearsal Transposed_.

It must be conceded in favour of printers that some authors do write an execrable hand. One sometimes receives a letter which requires about three readings before it can be understood. At the first time of reading the meaning is scarcely intelligible, at the second time some faint glimpse of the writer's object in writing is obtained, and at the third time the main point of the letter is deciphered. Such men may be deemed to be the plague of printers. A friend of Beloe ''the s.e.xagenarian'' was remonstrated with by a printer for being the cause of a large amount of swearing in his office. ''Sir,'' exclaimed Mr. A., ''the moment 'copy' from you is divided among the compositors, volley succeeds volley as rapidly and as loudly as in one of Lord Nelson's victories.''

There is a popular notion among authors that it is not wise to write a clear hand; and Mnage was one of the first to express it.

He wrote: ''If you desire that no mistakes

shall appear in the works which you publish, never send well-written copy to the printer, for in that case the ma.n.u.script is given to young apprentices, who make a thousand errors; while, on the other hand, that which is difficult to read is dealt with by the master-printers.'' It is also related that the late eminent Arabic scholar, Mr.

E. W. Lane, who wrote a particularly good hand, asked his printer how it was that there were always so many errors in his proofs. He was answered that such clear writing was always given to the boys, as experienced compositors could not be spared for it. The late Dean Hook held to this opinion, for when he was asked to allow a sermon to be copied out neatly for the press, he answered that if it were to be printed he would prefer to write it out himself as badly as he could. This practice, if it ever existed, we are told by experienced printers does not exist now.

It must, one would think, have been the badness of the ''copy'' that induced the compositors to turn ''the nature and theory of the Greek verb'' into _the native theology of the Greek verb_; ''the conser

vation of energy'' into the _conversation of energy_; and the ''Forest Conservancy Branch'' into the _Forest Conservatory Branch_.

Some printers go out of their way to make blunders when they are unable to understand their ''copy.'' Thus, in the _Times_, some years ago, among the contributors to the Garibaldi Fund was a bookbinder who gave five s.h.i.+llings. The next down in the list was one ''A. Lega Fletcher,'' a name which was printed as _A Ledger st.i.tcher_.

Some very extraordinary blunders have been made by the ignorant misreading of an author's contractions. It is said that in a certain paper which was sent to be printed the words Indian Government were contracted as Indian Govt.

This one compositor set up throughout his turn as _Indian goat_. A writer in one of the Reviews wrote the words ''J. C.

first invaded Britain,'' and a worthy compositor, who made it his business to fill up all the abbreviations, printed this as _Jesus Christ_ instead of Julius C

Here it may be remarked that some of

the most extraordinary misprints never get farther than the printing office or the study; but although they may have been discovered by the reader or the author, they were made nevertheless.

Sometimes the fun of a misprint consists in its elaborateness and completeness, and sometimes in its simplicity (perhaps only the change of a letter).

Of the first cla.s.s the transformation of s.h.i.+rley's well-known lines is a good example:--

''Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.''

is scarcely recognisable as

''All the low actions of the just Swell out and blow Sam in the dust.''

The statement that ''men should work and play Loo,'' obtained from ''men should work and play too,'' ill.u.s.trates the second cla.s.s.

The version of Pope which was quoted by a correspondent of the _Times_ about a year ago is very charming:--

''A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the aperient spring.'

The reporter or printer who mistook the Oxford professor's allusion to the Eumenides, and quoted him as speaking of ''those terrible old Greek G.o.ddesses--the Humanities,'' was still more elaborate in his joke.