The strife of tongs is suggestive of a more serious battle than that of talk only; and the compositor who set up Portia's speech—
``. . . young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy''
(Merchant of Venice, act iii., sc. 2),
and turned the last words into howling Tory, must have been a rabid politician.
The transposition of ``He kissed her under the silent stars'' into ``He kicked her under the cellar stairs'' looks rather too good to be true, and it cannot be vouched for; but the title ``Microscopic Character of the Virtuous Rocks of Montana'' is a genuine misprint for vitreous, as is also ``Buddha's perfect uselessness'' for ``Buddha's perfect sinlessness.'' It is rather startling to find a quotation from the Essay on Man introduced by the words ``as the Pope says,'' or to find the famous painter Old Crome styled an ``old Crone.''
A most amusing instance of a misreading may be mentioned here, although it is not a literary blunder. A certain <p 151>black cat was named Mephistopheles a name which greatly puzzled the little girl who played with the cat, so she very sensibly set to work to reduce the name to a form which she could understand, and she arrived at ``Miss Pack-of-fleas.''
Sometimes a ludicrous blunder may be made by the mere closing up of two words; thus the orator who spoke of our ``grand Mother Church'' had his remark turned into a joke when it was printed as ``grandmother Church.'' A still worse blunder was made in an obituary notice of a well-known congressman in an American paper, where the reference to his ``gentle, manly spirit'' was turned into ``gentlemanly spirit.''
Misprints are very irritating to most authors, but some can afford to make fun of the trouble; thus Hood's amusing lines are probably founded upon some blunder that actually occurred:—
``But it is frightful to think
What nonsense sometimes
They make of one's sense,
And what's worse, of one's rhymes.
<p 152>
``It was only last week,
In my ode upon Spring,
Which I meant to have made
A most beautiful thing,
``When I talked of the dew-drops
From freshly-blown roses,
The nasty things made it
From freshly-blown noses.