St. Paul to the Ephesians
In the first edition of Dombey and Son (ch. xii.), Dr. Blimber, the master of a select school at Brighton, is made to say to one of his offending pupils, “Johnson will repeat to me to-morrow morning, before breakfast, without book, and from the Greek Testament, the first chapter of the First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians.” In imposing this penalty, the pompous pedagogue overlooked the fact that there is but one Epistle to the Ephesians in the New Testament. Mr. Dickens’s attention must have been awakened to his error, as it was corrected in subsequent editions.
Byron’s Greek
In Prof. Albert H. Smyth’s “Life of Bayard Taylor” occurs this sentence: “At the Piræus Taylor saw Mrs. Black, ‘The Maid of Athens,’ to whom Byron sang in impossible and ungrammatical Greek.”
The allusion is evidently to the concluding line of the stanzas,
Ζωή μου σᾶς ἀγαπῶ,
which means simply, “My life, I love thee.”
Ought not Professor Smyth to have stayed his pen from this unnecessary impeachment of Byron’s knowledge of Greek, when he remembered that the poet had lived on familiar terms with Greeks long before he went to fight and die for the independence of their famous land? The line given above is colloquial modern Greek, exactly suited to the character of the poem, and was not intended for ancient classic Greek.
Triple Error
In the “Heart of Midlothian” (ch. 1.) is the following passage respecting Effie Deans: