The admirable Mr. Brooke, when he purposed to contest the Borough of Middlemarch, found Will Ladislaw extremely useful, because he "remembered what the right quotations are—Omne tulit punctum, and that sort of thing." And certainly an apt quotation is one of the most effective decorations of a public speech; but the dangers of inappositeness are correspondingly formidable. I have always heard that the most infelicitous quotation on record was made by the fourth Lord Fitzwilliam at a county meeting held at York to raise a fund for the repair of the Minster after the fire which so nearly destroyed it in 1829. Previous speakers had, naturally, appealed to the pious munificence of Churchmen. Lord Fitzwilliam, as the leading Whig of the county, thought that it would be an excellent move to enlist the sympathies of the rich Nonconformists, and that he was the man to do it. So he perorated somewhat after the following fashion:—"And, if the liberality of Yorkshire Churchmen proves insufficient to restore the chief glory of our native county, then, with all confidence, I turn to our excellent Dissenting brethren, and I exclaim, with the Latin poet,
'Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo.'"
Mr. Anstey Guthrie has some pleasant instances of texts misapplied. He was staying once in a Scotch country-house where, over his bed, hung an illuminated scroll with the inscription, "Occupy till I come," which, as Mr. Guthrie justly observes, is an unusually extended invitation, even for Scottish notions of hospitality. According to the same authority, the leading citizen of a seaside town erected some iron benches on the sea front, and, with the view of at once commemorating his own munificence and giving a profitable turn to the thoughts of the sitters, inscribed on the backs—
THESE SEATS
WERE PRESENTED TO THIS TOWN OF SHINGLETON
BY
JOSEPH BUGGINS, ESQ.,
J.P. FOR THE BOROUGH.
"THE SEA IS HIS, AND HE MADE IT."
Nothing is more deeply rooted in the mind of the average man than that certain well-known aphorisms of piety are to be found in the Bible—possibly in that lost book the Second Epistle to the Ephesians, which Dickens must have had in his mind when he wrote in Dombey and Son of the First Epistle to that Church. "In the midst of life we are in death" is a favourite quotation from this imaginary Scripture. "His end was peace" holds its place on many a tomb in virtue of a similar belief. "He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb" is, I believe, commonly attributed to Solomon; and a charming song which was popular in my youth declared that, though the loss of friends was sad, it would have been much sadder,
"Had we ne'er heard that Scripture word,
'Not lost, but gone before.'"
Mrs. Gamp, with some hazy recollections of the New Testament floating in her mind, invented the admirable aphorism that "Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye." And a lady of my acquaintance, soliloquizing on the afflictions of life and the serenity of her own temper, exclaimed, "How true it is what Solomon says, 'A contented spirit is like a perpetual dropping on a rainy day'!"
A Dissenting minister, winding up a week's mission, is reported to have said, "And if any spark of grace has been kindled by these exercises, oh, we pray Thee, water that spark." A watered spark is good, but what of a harnessed volcano? When that eminent Civil servant, Sir Hugh Owen, retired from the Local Government Board, a gentleman wrote to the Daily Chronicle in favour of "harnessing this by no means extinct volcano to the great task" of codifying the Poor Law. An old peasant-woman in Buckinghamshire, extolling the merits of her favourite curate, said to the rector, "I do say that Mr. Woods is quite an angel in sheep's clothing;" and Dr. Liddon told me of a Presbyterian minister who was called on at short notice to officiate at the parish church of Crathie in the presence of the Queen, and, transported by this tremendous experience, burst forth in rhetorical supplication—"Grant that as she grows to be an old woman she may be made a new man; and that in all righteous causes she may go forth before her people like a he-goat on the mountains."
Undergraduates, whose wretched existence for a week before each examination is spent in the hasty acquisition of much ill-assorted and indigestible knowledge, are not seldom the victims of similar confusions. At Oxford—and, for all I know, at Cambridge too—a hideous custom prevails of placing before the examinee a list of isolated texts, and requiring him to supply the name of the speaker, the occasion, and the context.