If we searched bibliographical literature we should find a fair crop of authors who never existed; for when once a blunder of this kind is set going, it seems to bear a charmed life.  Mr. Daydon Jackson mentions some amusing instances of imaginary authors made out of title-pages in his Guide to the Literature of Botany.  An anonymous work of A. Massalongo, entitled Graduale Passagio delle Crittogame alle Fanerogame (1876), has been entered in a German bibliography as written by G. Passagio.  In an English list Kelaart’s Flora Calpensis:  Reminiscences of Gibraltar (1846) appears as the work of a lady—­ p 69Christian name, Flora; surname, Calpensis.  In 1837 a Botanical-Lexicon was published by an author who described himself as ``The Rev. Patrick Keith, Clerk, F.L.S.’’ This somewhat pedantic form deceived a foreign cataloguer, who took Clerk for the surname, and contracted ``Patrick Keith’’ into the initials P.K.  More inexcusable was the blunder of an American who, in describing J. E. H. Gordon’s work on Electricity, changed the author’s degree into the initials of a collaborator, one Cantab.  The joint authors were stated to be J. E. H. Gordon and B. A. Cantab.

A very amusing, but a quite excusable error, was made by Allibone in his Dictionary of English Literature, under the heading of Isaac D’Israeli.  He notices new editions of that author’s works revised by the Right Hon. the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of course Isaac’s son Benjamin, afterwards Prime Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield; but unfortunately there were two Chancellors in 1858, and Allibone chooses the wrong one, printing, as useful information to the reader, that the reviser was Sir George p 70Cornewall Lewis.  An instance of the danger of inconsiderate explanation will be found in a little book by a German lady, Fanny Lewald, entitled England and Schottland.  The authoress, when in London, visited the theatre in order to see a play founded on Cooper’s novel The Wept of Wish-ton Wish; and being unable to understand the title, she calls it the ``Will of the Whiston Wisp,’’ which she tells us means an ignis fatuus.

A writer in a German paper was led into an amusing blunder by an English review a few years ago.  The reviewer, having occasion to draw a distinction between George and Robert Cruikshank, spoke of the former as the real Simon Pure.  The German, not understanding the allusion, gravely told his readers that George Cruikshank was a pseudonym, the author’s real name being Simon Pure.  This seems almost too good to be equalled, but a countryman of our own has blundered nearly as grossly.  William Taylor, in his Historic Survey of German Poetry (1830), prints the following absurd statement:  ``Godfred of Berlichingen is one p 71of the earliest imitations of the Shakspeare tragedy which the German school has produced.  It was admirably translated