Another humorist set up a reference to “Susanna and the Elders,”
“Susanna and the Editors,” which was not just the same thing. Possibly the printer had another and equally apocryphal episode in his mind’s eye.
I felt a warm personal regard for the man who made a lecturer state that a critic had “poured out the violets of his wrath upon him.” The criticism did not, under these circumstances, seem particularly severe.
I must frankly confess, however, that I had nothing but reprobation for the one who made a clergyman state in a lecture to a class of young ladies, that his favourite poem of Wordsworth’s was “Invitations to Immorality.” Nor had I the least feeling except of indignation for the one who set up the title of a picture in which I was interested, “a rare turnip,” instead of “a rare tulip.” The printer who at the conclusion of an obituary notice was expected to announce to the readers of the paper that “the interment will take place on Saturday,” but who, instead, gave them to understand that “the entertainment will take place on Saturday,” did not, I think, cause any awkward mishap. He knew that the idea was that of entertainment, whatever the word employed might be.
The compositor who caused an editor to refer to “the autotype of the Russian people,” when the word autocrat was in the “copy” before him, was less to be blamed than the reader who allowed such a mistake to pass without correction.
When I read on a proof one night that the most striking scene in The Dead Heart at the Lyceum was “the burning of the Pastille and the dance of the Rigmarole,” I asked for the “copy” that had been telegraphed; and I found that the printer was not responsible for this marvellous blunder.
It will be remembered that at one of his lectures in the United States, Mr. Richard A. Proctor remarked that in the course of a few million years something remarkable would happen, but that its occurrence would not inconvenience his audience, as he supposed they would all be in Paradise at that time.
In one paper the reporter made him say that he supposed his audience would all be in Paris at that time.