Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/794

764 An influential English journal made the amende honorable as follows, for a curious blunder:

An amusing instance lately occurred in connection with the Jamaica prosecutions. Mr. Stephen was made to say in the "Times," that he treated Mr. Eyre as he had often treated obscene and uninteresting criminals. Every one saw that this was a misprint for obscure, but the printer, or editor, persisted in saying that the error was in the manuscript.

"The stillness of the hour is the stillness of a dead calm at sea," Professor Phelps wrote in his book, "The Still Hour." Several hundred copies were printed and sold, in which the word "calm" became "clam." The Reverend Doctor Todd, having presented some relics from an acquaintance to be deposited in the museum of a prominent institution, made some allusions to the "Lives of the Saints." His remarks when published, alluded, through a typographical blunder, to the "Lies of the Saints," which so enraged the owner of the relics that he wrote to Doctor Todd, demanding their return. The late Doctor Bethune used to relate, that reading one morning a report of a discourse delivered by him the day before, he found the remark, "And the adversary came among them and sowed tares," printed "And the adversary came among them and sawed treestrees [sic]."

"For instance," pathetically writes an author, "what opinion can an 'appreciative and indulgent public 'entertain of your mythological knowledge, when they see you writing about the 'Jormose Hercules,' and the 'Venus de Medicine,' and referring to the majesty of the great 'Juniper'? What is their opinion of your classic attainments as you discourse of the immortal Horner and Virgin, and admire the Plutonian philosophy, and assure them that the Greek (Creek) rate was utterly exterminated some twenty years since by the Camanche Indians? If you mention that you have been 'regaling yourself with a page of Friar Bacon,' the stupid printer invariably has it 'a plate of fried bacon'—just as poor Goldsmith saw his lines, in which he so ingeniously imitated the notes of a nightingale —

converted into—

to his everlasting mortification and confusion.

"If you write a rural love-sketch, you see your rustic hero and heroine in a hay-field on a lonely summer evening, she with 'a cluster of wild puppies (poppies) in her hat and a pickle (sickle) in her hand, while his soft whisker (whisper) close to her ear brings a deeper color to her cheek.' 'From that blissful hour,' you—or rather the printer—proceed to inform the reader that 'sadness and doubt have fled, and Job (joy) reigns alone; by which otherwise incomprehensible state-