Ampull, wherewith the King of France was sacred, which he said was sent from heaven above a thousand years ago, and since by miracle preserved, through whose virtue also the king held les estroilles.’’ From this we might imagine that the holy Ampulla was a person; but the clue to the whole confusion is to be p 37found in the last word of the sentence.  As the French language does not contain any such word as estroilles, there can be no doubt that it stands for old French escroilles, or the king’s evil.  The change of a few letters has here made the mighty difference between the power of curing scrofula and the gift of holding the stars.

In some copies of John Britton’s Descriptive Sketches of Tunbridge Wells (1832) the following extraordinary passage will be found:  ``Judge Jefferies, a man who has rendered his name infamous in the annals of history by the cruelty and injustice he manifested in presiding at the trial of King Charles I.’’ The book was no sooner issued than the author became aware of his astonishing chronological blunder, and he did all in his power to set the matter right; but a mistake in print can never be entirely obliterated.  However much trouble may be taken to suppress a book, some copies will be sure to escape, and, becoming valuable by the attempted suppression, attract all the more attention.

Scott makes David Ramsay, in the p 38_Fortunes of Nigel_ (chapter ii.), swear ``by the bones of the immortal Napier.’’ It would perhaps be rank heresy to suppose that Sir Walter did not know that ``Napier’s bones’’ were an apparatus for purposes of calculation, but he certainly puts the expression in such an ambiguous form that many of his readers are likely to suppose that the actual bones of Napier’s body were intended.

Some of the most curious of blunders are those made by learned men who without thought set down something which at another time they would recognise as a mistake.  The following passage from Mr. Gladstone’s Gleanings of Past Years (vol. i., p. 26), in which the author confuses Daniel with Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, has been pointed out:  ``The fierce light that beats upon a throne is sometimes like the heat of that furnace in which only Daniel could walk unscathed, too fierce for those whose place it is to stand in its vicinity.’’ Who would expect to find Macaulay blundering on a subject he knew so well as the story of the Faerie Queene! and yet this is what he p 39wrote in a review of Southey’s edition of the Pilgrim’s Progress:  ``Nay, even Spenser himself, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. . . .  One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen.  We become sick of Cardinal Virtues and Deadly Sins, and long for the society of plain men and women.  Of the persons who read the first Canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem.  Very few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast.’’[5] Macaulay knew well enough that the Blatant Beast did not die in the poem as Spenser left it.