[5] Edinburgh Review, vol. liv. (1831), p. 452.

The newspaper writers are great sinners, and what with the frequent ignorance and haste of the authors and the carelessness of the printers a complete farrago of nonsense is sometimes concocted between them.  A proper name is seldom given correctly in a daily paper, and it is a p 40frequently heard remark that no notice of an event is published in which an error in the names or qualifications of the actors in it ``is not detected by those acquainted with the circumstances.’’ The contributor of the following bit of information to the Week’s News (Nov. 18th, 1871) must have had a very vague notion of what a monosyllable is, or he would not have written, ``The author of Dorothy, De Cressy, etc., has another novel nearly ready for the press, which, with the writer’s partiality for monosyllabic titles, is named Thomasina.’’ He is perhaps the same person who remarked on the late Mr. Robertson’s fondness for monosyllables as titles for his plays, and after instancing Caste, Ours, and School, ended his list with Society.  We can, however, fly at higher game than this, for some twenty years ago a writer in the Times fell into the mistake of describing the entrance of one of the German states into the Zollverein in terms that proved him to be labouring under the misconception that the great Customs-Union was a new organisation.  Another source of error in the papers is the hurry p 41with which bits of news are printed before they have been authenticated.  Each editor wishes to get the start of his neighbour, and the consequence is that they are frequently deceived.  In a number of the Literary Gazette for 1837 there is a paragraph headed ``Sir Michael Faraday,’’ in which the great philosopher is congratulated upon the title which had been conferred upon him.  Another source of blundering is the attempt to answer an opponent before his argument is thoroughly understood.  A few years ago a gentleman made a note in the Notes and Queries to the effect that a certain custom was at least 1400 years old, and was probably introduced into England in the fifth century.  Soon afterwards another gentleman wrote to the same journal, ``Assuredly this custom was general before A.D. 1400’’; but how he obtained that date out of the previous communication no one can tell.

The Times made a strange blunder in describing a gallery of pictures:  ``Mr. Robertson’s group of `Susannah and the Elders,’ with the name of Pordenone, contains some passages of glowing colour p 42which must be set off against a good deal of clumsy drawing in the central figure of the chaste maiden.’’ As bad as this was the confusion in the mind of the critic of the New Gallery, who spoke of Mr Halle’’s Paolo and Francesca as that masterly study and production of the old Adam phase of human nature which Milton hit off so sublimely in the Inferno.