Another critic, having to review a reprint of Galt’s Lives of Players, complained that Mr. Galt had not brought his book down to the date of publication, being ignorant of the fact that John Galt died as long ago as 1839.  The reviewer of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare committed the worst blunder of all when he wrote that those persons who did not know their Shakespeare might read Mr. Lamb’s paraphrase if they liked, but for his part he did not see the use of such works.  The man who had never heard of Charles Lamb and his Tales must have very much mistaken his vocation when he set up as a literary critic.

These are all genuine cases, but the p 46story of Lord Campbell and his criticism of Romeo and Juliet is almost too good to be true.  It is said that when the future Lord Chancellor first came to London he went to the editor of the Morning Chronicle for some work.  The editor sent him to the theatre. ``Plain John’’ Campbell had no idea he was witnessing a play of Shakespeare, and he therefore set to work to sketch the plot of Romeo and Juliet, and to give the author a little wholesome advice.  He recommended a curtailment in parts so as to render it more suitable to the taste of a cultivated audience.  We can quite understand that if a story like this was once set into circulation it was not likely to be allowed to die by the many who were glad to have a laugh at the rising barrister.

CHAPTER III.

BLUNDERS OF TRANSLATORS.

THE blunders of translators are so common that they have been made to point a moral in popular proverbs.  According to an Italian saying translators are traitors (``I traduttori sono traditori’’); and books are said to be done into English, traduced in French, and overset in Dutch.  Colton, the author of Lacon, mentions a half-starved German at Cambridge named Render, who had been long enough in England to forget German, but not long enough to learn English.  This worthy, in spite of his deficiencies, was a voluminous translator of his native literature, and it became a proverbial saying among his intimates respecting a bad translation that it was Rendered into English.

The Comte de Tressan translated the p 48words ``capo basso’’ (low headland) in a passage from Ariosto by ``Cap de Capo Basso,’’ on account of which translation the wits insisted upon calling him ``Comte de Capo Basso.’’

Robert Hall mentions a comical stumble made by one of the translators of Plato, who construed through the Latin and not direct from the Greek.  In the Latin version hirundo stood as hirdo, and the translator, overlooking the mark of contraction, declared to the astonished world on the authority of Plato that the horse-leech instead of the swallow was the harbinger of spring.  Hoole, the translator of Tasso and Ariosto, was as confused in his natural history when he rendered ``I colubri Viscontei’’ or Viscontian snakes, the crest of the Visconti family, as ``the Calabrian Viscounts.’’