and turned the last words into howling Tory, must have been a rabid politician.

The transposition of ``He kissed her under the silent stars’’ into ``He kicked her under the cellar stairs’’ looks rather too good to be true, and it cannot be vouched for; but the title ``Microscopic Character of the Virtuous Rocks of Montana’’ is a genuine misprint for vitreous, as is also ``Buddha’s perfect uselessness’’ for ``Buddha’s perfect sinlessness.’’ It is rather startling to find a quotation from the Essay on Man introduced by the words ``as the Pope says,’’ or to find the famous painter Old Crome styled an ``old Crone.’’

A most amusing instance of a misreading may be mentioned here, although it is not a literary blunder.  A certain p 151black cat was named Mephistopheles a name which greatly puzzled the little girl who played with the cat, so she very sensibly set to work to reduce the name to a form which she could understand, and she arrived at ``Miss Pack-of-fleas.’’

Sometimes a ludicrous blunder may be made by the mere closing up of two words; thus the orator who spoke of our ``grand Mother Church’’ had his remark turned into a joke when it was printed as ``grandmother Church.’’ A still worse blunder was made in an obituary notice of a well-known congressman in an American paper, where the reference to his ``gentle, manly spirit’’ was turned into ``gentlemanly spirit.’’

Misprints are very irritating to most authors, but some can afford to make fun of the trouble; thus Hood’s amusing lines are probably founded upon some blunder that actually occurred:—­

 ``But it is frightful to think
     What nonsense sometimes
   They make of one’s sense,
     And what’s worse, of one’s rhymes.

p 152 ``It was only last week,
     In my ode upon Spring,
   Which I meant to have made
     A most beautiful thing,

 ``When I talked of the dew-drops
     From freshly-blown roses,
   The nasty things made it
     From freshly-blown noses.

 ``And again, when, to please
     An old aunt, I had tried
   To commemorate some saint
     Of her clique who had died,

 ``I said he had taken up
     In heaven his position,
   And they put it—­he’d taken
     Up to heaven his physician.’’

Henry Stephens (Estienne), the learned printer, made a joke over a misprint.  The word febris was printed with the diphthong _oe_, so Stephens excused himself by saying in the errata that ``le chalcographe a fait une fie!vre longue (foebrem) quoique une fie!vre courte (febrem) soit moins dangereux.’’

Allusion has already been made in the first chapter to Professor Skeat’s ghost p 153words.  Most of these have arisen from misreadings or misprints, and two extraordinary instances may be noted here.  The purely modern phrase ``look sharp’’ was supposed to have been used in the time of Chaucer, because ``loke schappe’’ (see that you form, etc.) of the manuscript was printed ``loke scharpe.’’ In the other instance the scribe wrote yn for m, and thus he turned ``chek matyde’’ into ``chek yn a tyde.’’[12]