Considering that Doctor Johnson was himself a severe verbal critic, it might be expected that his own writings would be correct. But he wrote: "Every monumental inscription should be in Latin; for that being a dead language it will always live." Another Johnsonian lapsus is palpable in the lines—
"Nor yet perceived the vital spirit fled,
But still fought on, nor knew that he was dead."
It would puzzle the reader to understand how a warrior could continue fighting after he was dead.
Blunders of Painters.
Tintoret, an Italian painter, in a picture of the Children of Israel gathering manna, represents them armed with guns. In Cigoli's painting of the circumcision of the infant Saviour, the aged Simeon has a pair of spectacles on his nose. In a picture by Verrio of Christ healing the sick, the by-standers have periwigs on their heads. A Dutch painter, in a picture of the Wise Men worshipping the Holy Child, has drawn one of them in a white surplice, and in boots and spurs, and he is in the act of presenting to the children a model of a Dutch man-of-war. In a Dutch picture of Abraham offering up his son, instead of the patriarch "stretching forth and taking the knife," he is represented as holding a blunderbuss to Isaac's head. Berlin represents in a picture the Virgin and Child listening to a violin. A French artist, in a painting of the Lord's Supper, has the table ornamented with tumblers filled with cigar lighters. Another French painting exhibits Adam and Eve in all their primeval simplicity, while near them, in full costume, is seen a hunter with a gun, shooting ducks.
Thackeray's Geographical Blunders.
The novelist, in "The Virginians," makes Madam Esmond, of Castlewood, in Westmoreland county, a neighbor of Washington at Mt. Vernon, on the Potomac, fifty miles distant, and a regular attendant at public worship at Williamsburg, half-way between the York and James rivers, fully one hundred and twenty-five miles from Mt. Vernon; and so "immensely affected" are the colored hearers of a young preacher at Williamsburg "that there was such a negro chorus about the house as might be heard across the Potomac," the nearest bank of which is fifty-seven miles away.
He makes General Braddock ride out from Williamsburg (he never was there) in "his own coach, a ponderous, emblazoned vehicle," with Dr. Franklin, "the little postmaster of Philadelphia" (Franklin's average weight was 160 pounds), over a muddy road, in March, through a half-wilderness country of more than one hundred miles, to dine with Madam Esmond, in Westmoreland county, near Mt. Vernon.
A Stupid Critic.
Commentators are sometimes stupid, and their criticisms so absurd as to be amusing. A German critic, in explaining the text of Shakespeare's comedy "As You Like It," came to the following passage—