Tommy, very sleepy, was saying his prayers. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” he began. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
“‘If,’” his mother prompted.
“If he hollers let him go, eeny, meeny, miny, mo!”
Perish the thought that the novelist or playwright should be tied down to historical accuracy! Lady Dorothy Neville quotes an amusing correspondence between Bulwer Lytton and her brother, Horace Walpole.
“My dear Walpole: Here I am at Bath—bored to death. I am thinking of writing a play about your great ancestor Sir Robert. Had he not a sister Lucy, and did she not marry a Jacobite?”
Walpole promptly replied:
“My dear Lytton: I care little for my family, and less still for Sir Robert, but I know that he never had a sister Lucy, so she could not have married a Jacobite.”
However, this mattered little to Lord Lytton, for his answer ran: