As strange as this is the Frenchman’s notion of the presence of guns in the canons’ seats:  ``L’Archeve^que de Cantorbery avait fait placer des canons dans les stalles de la cathe’drale.’’ He quite overlooked the word chanoines, which he should have used.  This use of a word p 49similarly spelt is a constant source of trouble to the translator:  for instance, a French translator of Scott’s Bride of Lammermuir left the first word of the title untranslated, with the result that he made it the Bridle of Lammermuir, ``La Bride de Lammermuir.’’

Thevenot in his travels refers to the fables of Damn et Calilve, meaning the Hitopodesa, or Pilpay’s Fables.  His translator calls them the fables of the damned Calilve.  This is on a par with De Quincey’s specimen of a French Abbe’’s Greek.  Having to paraphrase the Greek words ``gr ‘Hrodotos kai iaxwn’’ (Herodotus even while Ionicizing), the Frenchman rendered them ``Herodote et aussi Jazon,’’ thus creating a new author, one Jazon.  In the Present State of Peru, a compilation from the Mercurio Peruano, P. Geronymo Roman de la Higuera is transformed into ``Father Geronymo, a Romance of La Higuera.’’

In Robertson’s History of Scotland the following passage is quoted from Melville’s Account of John Knox:  ``He was so active and vigorous a preacher that he was like p 50to ding the pulpit into blads and fly out of it.’’ M. Campenon, the translator of Robertson into French, turns this into the startling statement that he broke his pulpit and leaped into the midst of his auditors.  A good companion to this curious ``fact’’ may be found in the extraordinary trope used by a translator of Busbequius, who says ``his misfortunes had reduced him to the top of all miseries.’’

We all know how Victor Hugo transformed the Firth of Forth into the First of the Fourth, and then insisted that he was right; but this great novelist was in the habit of soaring far above the realm of fact, and in a work he brought out as an offering to the memory of Shakespeare he showed that his imagination carried him far away from historical facts.  The author complains in this book that the muse of history cares more for the rulers than for the ruled, and, telling only what is pleasant, ignores the truth when it is unpalatable to kings.  After an outburst of bombast he says that no history of England tells us that Charles II. murdered his brother the Duke of Gloucester.  We should be surp 51prised if any did do so, as that young man died of small-pox.  Hugo, being totally ignorant of English history, seems to have confused the son of Charles I. with an earlier Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and turned the assassin into the victim.  After these blunders Dr. Baly’s mention of the cannibals of Nova Scotia instead of New Caledonia in his translation of Mu:ller’s Elements of Physiology seems tame.