Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/238

 230

NOTES AND QUERIES. [^ s. VIL MARCH 23, 1901.

keld, the well-known bookseller, of 306, Clap- ham Road.

What was the reason why Horace Walpole s surviving executrix should wish these extracts to be destroyed 1 Were the originals destroyed by Horace Walpole ? Did these extracts con- tain passages omitted from Horace Walpole's transcript? Walpole's own preface to the letters speaks of them as

"presented to the reader with scarce any variation or omissions, but what private friendships and private history, or the great haste with which the letters were written, made indispensably necessary."

J. F. ROTTON.

Godalmin.

JOURNALISTIC ERRORS.

(9 th S. vii. 128.)

YOUR suggestion that blunders of journal- ists are due to their not having time or the necessary equipment to be accurate will be approved by all who have been behind the scenes at a newspaper office, but a recital of some notorious blunders may guard the un- wary against the ridiculous assumption of infallibility affected by so many newspapers. I do not allude to what are obviously mere misprints, such as when the Morning Post announced at the head of its fashionable intelligence that Lord Palmerston had gone down into Hampshire with a party of fiends to shoot peasants, but I refer to blunders due to crass ignorance of a pretentious order. Perhaps the best instance was when one of the " young lions " of the Daily Telegraph in a leading article enumerated the great masters of Greek sculpture as Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Milo, ignorant of the fact that Milo is not a sculptor, but an island. The Times was even worse when, mistaking Prussia fo Austria, it devoted a whole leafier to dis- cussing why Prussia had joined the Zollverein. The Saturday Review once explained at great length that the population might be nourished gratuitously on young lambs, if killed un- weaiHMJ before they had begun to crop grass, having therefore cost nothing to feed. Many other instances will doubtless occur to your readers. ISAAC TAYLOR.

The question propounded here is grave and charged with large issues. The journalist naturally claims the privilege of all usi veriest as one of the perquisites of his craft, and at any rate no protestation is likely to have the effect of restraining him in his use of it The editorial note is very much to the pur- pose ; journalists must produce " copy," ano

^y are not always in the position of being able to verify quotations, even if their in- clination would lead them to make the attempt. Unfortunately, their misapprehen- sions and misquotations have in many cases the inconvenient quality of permanence. Both journalists and novelists contribute to the interesting results known as " the mock pearls of literature." To take an instance at random : Miss Thorneycroft Fowler speaks somewhere in 'The Farringdons ' of "anode to one's mistress's eyebrow," and "an ode" such a phantom composition is certain to be for many young enthusiasts in the immediate future. Again, readers of the newspapers have recently talked to weariness of Chris- topher Smart and his newly discovered ' Song to David.' They have received the impression from the reviewing journalist that this poem has hitherto been absolutely neglected even, perhaps, that its existence was altogether un- known and they feel no necessity for further investigation. As a man's newspaper guides his politics, so apparently it is doing, or is on the point of doing, for his literary know- ledge and opinions. He does not know, and probably does not care, whether or not the oracle to which he pins his faith offers him the results of sudden and imperfect examina- tion : the finished product is before him, and it serves his purpose. THOMAS BAYNE.

Glasgow.

"Charity would have saved Dr. Johnson from describing Gray as 'a barren rascal.'" Thus a writer in the Daily Neivs for 1 March, under the heading ' The Curse of Collins.' But it was Fielding the doctor so described. Mr. A. B. Walkley two years ago went into this very matter at a column's length in ihQ Daily Chronicle. Macaulay makes the same mistake as the Daily Neivs scribe. Sometimes blunders are due to printers, proof-readers, editors, not to writers themselves. I wonder, for instance, whether Lewes or a printer or proof-reader is really responsible for the following blunder in the "prolegomena" to 'History of Philosophy,' p. cxi: "AVe cannot conceive the contrary of a truth after its necessity has been demon- strated, but we can distinctly conceive that 17+9 = 25 before verification."

CEITICASTEK.

[Is not CRITICASTER wrong in this last instance and is not 25 intended ?]

One of the most extraordinary journalistic errors I remember to have seen is the pub lication in the Queen newspaper a few weeks since of the portrait of the Black Prince as the " first Prince of Wales." C. C. B.

Epworth.