`` 'Tis true, 'tis pity, pity 'tis 'tis true,''
one might have expected the compositor to recognise the quotation, instead of printing the astonishing calculation—
`` 'Tis two, 'tis fifty and fifty 'tis, 'tis five.''
This is as bad as the blunder of the printer of the Hampshire paper who is said to have announced that Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were engaged shooting peasants at Drayton Manor.
It is perhaps scarcely fair to quote too many blunders from newspapers, which must often be hurriedly compiled, but naturally they furnish the richest crop. <p 127>The point of a leader in an American paper was lost by a misprint, which reads as follows: ``We do battle without shot or charge for the cause of the right.'' This would be a very ineffectual battle, and the proper words were without stint or change.
A writer on Holland in one of the magazines quoted Samuel Butler's well- known lines—
``A country that draws fifty foot of water,
. . . . . . .
In which they do not live, but go aboard,''
which the printer transformed into
``In which they do not live, but cows abound.''
It is of course easy to invent misprints, and therefore one feels a little doubtful sometimes with respect to those which are quoted without chapter and verse.