These Verbal Infelicities are by no means confined to social intercourse.  Lord Cross, when the House laughed at his memorable speech in favour of Spiritual Peers, exclaimed in solemn remonstrance, “I hear a smile.”  When the Bishop of Southwell, preaching in the London Mission of 1885, began his sermon by saying, “I feel a feeling which I feel you all feel,” it is only fair to assume that he said something which he would rather have expressed differently.  Quite lately I heard an Irish rhetorician exclaim, “If the Liberal Party is to maintain its position, it must move forward.”  A clerical orator, fresh from a signal triumph at a Diocesan Conference, informed me, together with some hundreds of other hearers, that when his resolution was put “quite a shower of hands went up;” and at a missionary meeting I once heard that impressive personage, “the Deputation from the Parent Society,” involve himself very delightfully in extemporaneous imagery.  He had been explaining that here in England we hear so much of the rival systems and operations of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society that we are often led to regard them as hostile institutions; whereas if, as he himself had done, his hearers would go out to the mission-field and observe the working of the societies at close quarters, they would find them to be in essential unison.  “Even so,” he exclaimed; “as I walked in the beautiful park which adjoins your town to-day, I noticed what appeared at a distance to be one gigantic tree.  It was only when I got close to it and sat down under its branches that I perceived that what I had thought was one tree was really two trees—­as completely distinct in origin, growth, and nature as if they had stood a hundred miles apart.”  No one in the audience (besides myself) noticed the infelicity of the illustration; nor do I think that the worthy “Deputation,” if he had perceived it, would have had the presence of mind to act as a famous preacher did in like circumstances, and, throwing up his hands, exclaim, “Oh, blessed contrast!”

But it does not always require verbal infelicity to produce a “Thing one would rather have expressed differently.”  The mere misplacement of a comma will do it.  A distinguished graduate of Oxford determined to enter the Nonconformist ministry, and, quite unnecessarily, published a manifesto setting forth his reasons and his intentions.  In his enumeration of the various methods by which he was going to mark his aloofness from the sacerdotalism of the Established Church, he wrote; “I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish me from my fellow-Christians.”  Need I say that all the picture-shops of the University promptly displayed a fancy portrait of the newly fledged minister clad in what Artemus Ward called “the scandalous style of the Greek slave,” and bearing the unkind inscription—­“The Rev. X.Y.Z. distinguishing himself from his fellow-Christians”?  If a comma too much brought ruin into Mr. Z.’s allocution, a comma too little was the undoing of a well-remembered advertisement.  “A PIANO for sale by a lady about to leave England in an oak case with carved legs.”