BLUNDERS OF AUTHORS.

MACAULAY, in his life of Goldsmith in the Encyclopdia Britannica, relates that that author, in the History of England, tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire, and that the mistake was not corrected when the book was reprinted.  He further affirms that Goldsmith was nearly hoaxed into putting into the History of Greece an account of a battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma.  This, however, is scarcely a fair charge, for the backs of most of us need to be broad enough to bear the actual blunders we have made throughout life without having to bear those which we almost made.

Goldsmith was a very remarkable instance of a man who undertook to write books on subjects of which he knew p 32nothing.  Thus, Johnson said that if he could tell a horse from a cow that was the extent of his knowledge of zoology; and yet the History of Animated Nature can still be read with pleasure from the charm of the author’s style.

Some authors are so careless in the construction of their works as to contradict in one part what they have already stated in another.  In the year 1828 an amusing work was published on the clubs of London, which contained a chapter on Fighting Fitzgerald, of whom the author writes:  ``That Mr. Fitzgerald (unlike his countrymen generally) was totally devoid of generosity, no one who ever knew him will doubt.’’ In another chapter on the same person the author flatly contradicts his own judgment:  ``In summing up the catalogue of his vices, however, we ought not to shut our eyes upon his virtues; of the latter, he certainly possessed that one for which his countrymen have always been so famous, generosity.’’ The scissors-and-paste compilers are peculiarly liable to such errors as these; and a writer in the Quarterly Review proved the Mmoires p 33de Louis XVIII_. (published in 1832) to be a mendacious compilation from the Mmoires de Bachaumont by giving examples of the compiler’s blundering.  One of these muddles is well worth quoting, and it occurs in the following passage:  ``Seven bishops—­of Puy, Gallard de Terraube; of Langres, La Luzerne; of Rhodez, Seignelay-Colbert; of Gast, Le Tria; of Blois, Laussiere Themines; of Nancy, Fontanges; of Alais, Beausset; of Nevers, Seguiran.’’ Had the compiler taken the trouble to count his own list, he would have seen that he had given eight names instead of seven, and so have suspected that something was wrong; but he was not paid to think.  The fact is that there is no such place as Gast, and there was no such person as Le Tria.  The Bishop of Rhodez was Seignelay-Colbert de Castle Hill, a descendant of the Scotch family of Cuthbert of Castle Hill, in Inverness-shire; and Bachaumont misled his successor by writing Gast Le Hill for Castle Hill.  The introduction of a stop and a little more misspelling resulted in the blunder as we now find it. p 34