From Chamber's Journal.
SLIPS OF THE PEN.
When Mrs. Caxton innocently made her wiser-half the father of an anachronism, that worthy scholar was much troubled in consequence. His anachronism was a living one, or he might have comforted himself by reflecting that greater authors than he had stood in the same paternal predicament. Our old English dramatists took tremendous liberties this way, never allowing considerations of time and place to stand in the way of any allusion likely to tell with their audience. Shakespeare would have been slow to appreciate a modern manager's anxiety for archaeological fidelity. His Greeks and Romans talk about cannons and pistols, and his Italian clowns are thorough cockneys, familiar with every nook and corner of London. And so it is with other caterers for the stage. Nat Lee talks about cards in his tragedy of "Hannibal;" Otway makes Spartan notables carouse and drink deep; Mrs. Cowley's Lacedaemonian king speaks of the night's still Sabbath; D'Urfey's ancient Britons are familiar with Puritans and packet-boats; and Rymer (though he set himself up for a critic) supplies a stage direction for the representative of his Saxon heroine to pull off her patches, when her lover desires her to lay aside her ornaments.
When Colman read "Inkle and Yarico" to Dr. Moseley, the latter exclaimed: "It won't do. Stuff! Nonsense!"—"Why?" asked the alarmed dramatist.—"Why, you say in the finale:
'Come let us dance and sing.
While all Barbadoes' bells shall ring!'
It won't do; there is but one bell in the island!" This mistake was excusable enough; but when Milton described
"A green mantling vine,
That crawls along the side of yon small hill,"
he must certainly have forgotten he had laid the scene of "Comus" in North Wales. Ernest Jones, describing a battle in his poem, "The Lost Army," says:
"Delay and doubt did more that hour
Than bayonet-charge or carnage shower;"
and some lines further on pictures his hero