We can fancy Richard Porson’s rage (for Porson was of violent temper) when, having written the statement that ``the crowd rent the air with their shouts,’’ his printer made the line read ``the crowd rent the air with their snouts.’’ However, this error was a natural one, since it occurs in the ``Catechism of the Swinish Multitude.’’ Royalty only are privileged when it comes to the matter of blundering.  When Louis XIV. was a boy he one day spoke of ``un carosse’’; he should have said ``une carosse,’’ but he was king, and having changed the gender of carosse the change was accepted, and unto this day carosse is masculine.

That errors should occur in newspapers is not remarkable, for much of the work in a newspaper office is done hastily.  Yet some of these errors are very amusing.  I remember to have read in a Berlin newspaper a number of years ago that ``Prince Bismarck is trying to keep up honest and straightforward relations with all the girls’’ (madchen).

This statement seemed incomprehensible until it transpired that the word ``madchen’’ was in this instance a misprint for ``machten,’’ a word meaning all the European powers.

X

WHEN FANCHONETTE BEWITCHED ME

The garden in which I am straying has so many diversions to catch my eye, to engage my attention and to inspire reminiscence that I find it hard to treat of its beauties methodically.  I find myself wandering up and down, hither and thither, in so irresponsible a fashion that I marvel you have not abandoned me as the most irrational of madmen.

Yet how could it be otherwise?  All around me I see those things that draw me from the pathway I set out to pursue:  like a heedless butterfly I flit from this sweet unto that, glorying and revelling in the sunshine and the posies.  There is little that is selfish in a love like this, and herein we have another reason why the passion for books is beneficial.  He who loves women must and should love some one woman above the rest, and he has her to his keeping, which I esteem to be one kind of selfishness.

But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion.  Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!

To return now to the matter of booksellers, I would fain impress you with the excellences of the craft, for I know their virtues.  My association with them has covered so long a period and has been so intimate that even in a vast multitude of people I have no difficulty in determining who are the booksellers and who are not.

For, having to do with books, these men in due time come to resemble their wares not only in appearance but also in conversation.  My bookseller has dwelt so long in his corner with folios and quartos and other antique tomes that he talks in black-letter and has the modest, engaging look of a brown old stout binding, and to the delectation of discriminating olfactories he exhaleth an odor of mildew and of tobacco commingled, which is more grateful to the true bibliophile than all the perfumes of Araby.