in most cases only too well rid of this tearful and miserable world, and of an enslaved and unnatural if not altogether wasted life.

Whatever were the vices of those great armies of celibates who fought the battle of the Church during the Middle Ages, whatever their ambition, voluptuousness, gluttony, and avarice, their greatest enemy must own that we owe them much for the learning they hoarded, the education they encouraged, the charity they displayed, and the buildings they reared. Who can stand up and say that the builders of such churches as York Minster and Salisbury Cathedral were mere halftransmuted pagans? Was there no worship of the soul in the men who reared that pile and raised those towers who hollowed those cloisters and carved those altars?

ing her prisons with the Jesuits, of Cromwell burning the priest, or Calvin drowning the Anabaptist.

For the majority of honest monks the convent was no doubt the whole world, and the cathedral a threshold of heaven. On that high altar, fifty years before, they had made their vow, by that altar they knelt on the eve of death; those huge windows, like the blazoned doors of paradise, had cast on their choir-books half a century of light and shadow. By this shrine they knelt the day when Brother Jerome died. In that cloister they used to pace together, and the greenest spot in the garth is where he lies, waiting for his old comrades in good works. Those great bells in the tower for them had the voices of friends.

from which such men as Chaucer's good parson sprang. When we read of the dregs of the convent, let us not forget those beautiful lines which paint a man who might have been a friend of Goldsmith's honest vicar.

Let us be satisfied by owning, then, that the monks were, after all, good and It is not for us to point out the faults of bad like other men, and that they led a those men. Who are we, to judge of more varied and useful life than has been their vices or their sins? It is a sufficient generally imagined. It could not have proof that the monastic system was a nec-been a wholly dissolute and selfish class essary phase of Christianity that the monastic system existed. It was not the finger of a poor monk that could stop the rolling world. These convents were the fortresses of piety; their system was the reaction of sword-law, violence, and rapine. St. Bernard and King John, Rochester and Penn, St. Paul and Tiberius, A good man ther was of religioun, Wesley and Wilkes, such are the typi- That was a poure persone of a town: fied reactions of every age. The very But rich he was of holy thought and werk. pastimes of these men were useful to He was also a lerned man, a clerk, ourselves. From the madness of alche- That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche. my sprang modern chemistry; from the Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, And in adversite ful patient. dreams of astrology the certainties of as- Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder, tronomy. Faraday and Chaucer's "Cheat But he ne left nought for no rain ne thonder, with the Alembec," Galeotti and New-In sicknesse and in mischief to visite ton, had still something in common. To the monks' scholastic theology we owe the preservation of Aristotle; and the labours of their copiers saved Homer and Plato from the fate of Ennius and Sappho. Their ideal was too perfect for our nature yet. They were the first missionaries and the first colonizers - the defenders of the serf, the educators of the poor. The monk and the knight were necessary phases of a civilization dangerous and ridiculous only when their use was past. Every nation has given its art some peculiar attribute of divinity. That of the Mexican was terror, that of the Greek beauty, of the Egyptian repose, of the Assyrian power, of the monks love. Their faults were of their age. We should no more complain of St. Bernard preaching the crusade than we should of Elizabeth fill

The ferrest in his parish, moche and lite.
Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf,
This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf,
That first he wrought and afterwards he
He was a shepherd and no mercenarie,
taught.
And though he holy were, and vertuous,
He was to sinful men not dispitious,
Ne of his speche dangerous ne digne,
But in his learning discrete and benigne.
To drawen folk to heaven, with fairenesse,
By good example was his besinesse :
But it were any persone obstinat,
What so he were of highe or low estat,
Him wolde he snibben sharply for the nones,
A better priest I trowe that nowther non is.
Ne miked him no spiced conscience,
He waited after no pompe ne reverence,
But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,
HE TAUGHT, BUT FIRST HE FOLOWED IT

HIMSELVE.

W. T.

66

From The Spectator.

MISQUOTATION.

We have read somewhere of a young preacher who, after he had delivered an eloquent sermon before a learned assembly, was beckoned aside by one of the fathers," who thus addressed him: "Mr. So-and-So, twice in your sermon today you quoted Scripture, and oddly enough, in both instances, you misquoted. You didn't alter the sense of the passages, to be sure, but you used a sort of off-hand translation of your own, instead of the grand old Authorized Version.' Take an old man's advice, and never do so again. When you quote from a writer, whether sacred or profane, always be at the pains to verify the quotation." Misquotation is not, however, limited to energetic pulpiteers. In the hurry of modern requirements - daily newspapers, magazines, and reviews it has become rather an unfashionable thing to be tied by rule, and authors of repute, whose example may prove infectious, clearly do not conde scend to verify, and often fall into dangerous forms of paraphrase. Emerson says that "there are great ways of borrowing," and that "next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it;" but he cannot have meant to give any sanction for a gypsy-like disfiguration in the process of transference. It is because things have come to a very bad pass indeed, even among those who should know better and show better, that we venture to give a few samples, culled from a very long list of recent offences against all ethics of quota

tion.

Mrs. Oliphant, usually a very conscientious writer, is far from blameless in this matter. For example, one of the most unlucky of recent citations ran right through all the forms her pleasant "Rose in June" enjoyed, and is now elevated even to the glory of stereotype in the cheap edition. It is one of Tennyson's finest lines. To dying eyes—~

posed to the tedious process of verification. So we find him, in his last published volume, making Wordsworth say,

There was a roaring in the woods all night, when Wordsworth wrote "in the wind," and when the word "woods" coming in a rhyme immediately afterwards would have made it extremely awkward. A more unfortunate instance still is his paraphrase of Tennyson's famous lines: — The old order changes, giving place to the

new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,
the first line having lost all rhythm and
lapsed into awkward prose.

But of all recent offenders, Mrs. Charles, the accomplished author of "The Schönberg-Cotta Family," who cunningly combines a faint odour of Evangelicalism with a certain mystical breadth, is decidedly book of hers but they leap into your eyes, among the worst. You can hardly open a as the French say. She has furniture

too bright and good

For common nature's daily food, which is hardly allowable, even though the copulative "and" be consciously used for "or," and "common" for "human." Furniture as food is surely a refinement far beyond the native simplicity of Wordsworth! Over and above her unquestioned facility of misquotation, however, this lady has an almost unique power of theological perversion. When she is in the very act of proving God's oneness of presence through all events and through all time, she makes Mr. Tennyson come to her support, as if he spoke thus of One divine event, For which the whole creation waits, instead of

That far-off, divine event, To which the whole creation moves, moving, and not waiting, being the idea she herself wishes to enforce. Worse still - if indeed worse could be-is a case which has just come under our eye as we but to the dying eyes of Mr. Damerel, the, write, where she credits the laureate with rector, on his own statement,

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

The hands which come from darkness
Moulding men,

gy the antipodes of theirs. German hymns | Chamouni Hymn is reduced to prose. and French memoirs of the pietistic or Coleridge wrote:

mystical cast, which she loves so much, Thou too, hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing all come alike to her; she misquotes them

all.

Miss Dora Greenwell is a thoughtful writer; but she grievously offends whenever she quotes. With her

An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry, becomes,

As infants crying in the dark,

As infants crying for the light, etc. It is lucky that her last volume is not likely to be opened by a certain class of read ers, for both "infants" and "in the dark” have, with them, a meaning all their own. Another exquisite verse in her hands becomes,

Of the moth that shrivels in a useless fire, The anguish that subserves another's gain. It is simple torture to remember the beauty of the original, with this travesty printed before us:

That not a worm is cloven in vain ;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Even Shakespeare's hackneyed schoolboy
lines escape not, but take on a new colour
from her pen:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the rise, leads on to fortune.
The beautiful couplet,

How difficult it is to keep Heights which the soul is competent to gain, becomes with her,

The heights which man is competent to win,
Incompetent to keep.

And Mr. Andrew Wilson, the versatile author of the justly praised "Abode of Snow," almost keeps pace with these ladies in his powers of prosifying poetry. By the insertion of turfs for tufts in this

fine verse from Wordsworth, can there be
two opinions that he improves it for the
worse?-

Through primrose turfs, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trail'd its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

This may be, and probably is, an error of
the press, but Coleridge does not fare
much better at Mr. Andrew Wilson's
hands. One of the finest touches in the

peaks,

Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard,
Shoots downward, glittering thro' the pure

serene,

in which it will be observed that the silence in the movement of the mighty mass is a pervading idea. But not so with Mr. Andrew Wilson, of "The Abode of Snow." He translates it,

Oft from whose feet the mighty avalanche
Shoots downward,

which is lame enough truly!

Wordsworth, we may note, fares partic ularly ill at the hands of later writers. Even Mr. Stopford Brooke, who has done so much to trace out the leading lines of his theology in a lofty spirit, in his last volume of sermons, comes very near to destroying one of the finest touches of theology in his poems. This is how he gives a famous passage from "The Ode to Duty: "—

Eternal Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything more fair
Than is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee in their beds,
And fragrance in their footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the immortal heavens, through thee, are
fresh and strong.

"Immortal" here, instead of "most an-
cient," does entirely change the sense.

A most curious case, and one of the most original-if any originality can be claimed in misquotation · was that of Mr. John Forster, who gave, in his second volume of Landor's "Life," a facsimile of a letter written in acknowledgment of a visit paid by Dickens and himself to the veteran on his seventy-fifth birthday, in which there occurs the following verse:

I

I

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;

warmed both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

With the facsimile before his eyes, the word before, which has a sweet hint of alliteration became, in Mr. Forster's letter-press copy, "against," which is prosaic, incorrect indeed, and such as Landor could hardly have written. Then the pointing is all wrong and common-place. A very characteristic clause of the letter besides is left out in Mr. Forster's copy. As we write, Macmillan's Magazine

storm

points,

for November is laid on our table. We | To fifty, till the terrible trumpet blared lift it up and glance over its contents. At the barrier - Yet a moment and once more Having been concerned with the niceties The trumpet — and again at which the of poetic expression, we not unnaturally turn at once to see what "A Lincolnshire And riders front to front, until they closed Of galloping hoofs bare on the ridge of spears Rector" has to say of Virgil and Tenny- In the middle, with the crash of shivering son, poets of so widely-separated eras. But here misquotations, and mispointings And thunder, etc., etc. such as destroy accent and sense together, are truly "presences not to be put by," and sadly disturb our enjoyment, all the more, that we feel the worth of many of "A Lincolnshire Rector's" remarks. A fine stanza of "Locksley Hall" is thus printed, rhyme and music being wholly

ruined:

Now this punctuation gives the page a look quite unlike Mr. Tennyson's usual contour of blank verse, for dashes, on the whole, he uses sparingly. But this is how we find this passage in all the edition we have access to:

The lists were ready.

Empanoplied and

We enter'd in, and waited, fifty-three
plumed
At the barrier like a wild horn in a land
Opposed to fifty, till the trumpet blared
Of echoes, and a moment, and once more
The trumpet, and again; at which the storm
And riders front to front, until they closed
Of galloping hoofs bare on the ridge of spears
In conflict with the crash of shivering points,

And thunder.

In the exquisite illustrative quotation
from "Elaine a line is omitted: -
And a spear,

Down-glancing, lamed his charger.
If it should be objected that these are
very trifling departures from the text to
justify such harsh criticism, let us remind
our readers of what Wordsworth inferred
from one of Sir Walter Scott's superficial-
ly insignificant misquotations from him.
"W. Scott quoted as from me," says

unpardonable botch of quotation from Wordsworth,

"The Last Tournament:

"The swan on sweet St. Mary's lake

Floats double, swan and shadow,

instead of still, thus obscuring my idea, and betraying his own uncritical principles of composition. Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He allows himself many liberties, which betray a want of respect for his reader. For instance, he is too fond of inversions, i.e., he often places the verb before the substantive, and the accusative before the verb," etc.*

That versatile writer, the author of "Guy Livingstone," who is always quoting in every language under heaven, at one place gives us the following lines:

She stood up in bitter case,
With a pale and steadfast face;
Toll slowly,

Like a statue thunderstrook,

That, though shivered, seemed to look
Right against the thunder-place.

"Prose Writings." Edited by Rev. A. B. Grosart. Vol. III., p. 462.

But turning to the original, the latest edi- | that of them with whom in this cause we tion, we find it reads thus :

Like a statue thunderstruck, which, though quivering, seems to look

Right against the thunder-place.

Now, the importance of correct quotation is seen in the impossibility of a statue which has been "shivered" looking, or seeming to look, against anything, and the tense absolutely precludes the idea of "shivering." So Mrs. Browning's delicate and beautiful fancy is wholly lost, and the verse prosified.

These errors · errors of a most flagrant kind—lie at the doors of writers of mark. We do not refer to second-rate magazines, far less to newspapers,- that would be a never-ending task. We may note, however, that, not very long ago, the Cornhill, usually very correct, gave as the title of Thackeray's unfinished story "Denis Donne," instead of "Denis Duval," and followed it up in a page or two with an unpardonable misquotation; and only the other week that usually well-edited journal, Land and Water, gave the following as the last verse from Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner :

He prayeth best who loveth best

All things, both great and small; For the great God who loveth us,

He made and loves them all.

strive, there are whose betters would hard

ly be found, if they did not live amongst
men, but in some wilderness by them-
selves." And the dean actually intro-
duced this quotation by the words, "To
the Puritans against whom he wrote he
acknowledged that it was impossible to
find better men than those who were
amongst them." The truth is, that Hook-
er was so full of calm, unmoved sarcasm,
that we sometimes cannot help feeling a
little of sympathy with his wife; and the
above is an instance of his cool and ir-
ritating attitude, so hiding itself under
assumed politeness as to cheat even a
master like Dean Stanley. In this case
certainly the dean has been a little too
facile in forcing men of the old type to
illustrate the breadth and ready sympathy
which he so admirably illustrates and
than the dean's was that of Colonel Went-
pleads for. Perhaps a still worse case
worth Higginson, author of
Essays," who, when speaking of the su-
periority of American magazines in re-
spect of style, in that they were, as he
held, more finished, careful, harmonious,
and less slangy, chanced to pounce upon
Dean Alford, asking, "What second-
rate American writer would see any wit
in describing himself, like Dean Alford in
his recent book on language, as 'an old
party in a shovel '?" * Now it happens

"Atlantic

that Dean Alford never did so describe himself, but chose rather in his "Queen's To account for such grave misrepresen- English" to expose the vulgarity of those tations of standard poets, whose writings who lent themselves to such modes of lie ready to the hand of any person of or- speech, as any one may see by reference dinary culture, is not difficult, and two to p. 228 of that very interesting, if somewords suffice,-haste and carelessness. times opinionated book. But Colonel It is worth inquiring, however, how it is Wentworth in this illustrates the tendenthat, whilst English authors suffer so se- cy to that overhastiness in his countryverely, foreign quotations are usually much men which Griswold seriously had to demore correctly given. The reason is ob-plore, as doing injury to literature in even vious. The writer is then on his guard; more important ways than failing to read he considers, refers, deems his reputation your author, a fault in which we, on this to be at stake. But a jealousy over our side, are but too closely following them. own classics should be paramount, and writers constantly offending by misquo* Atlantic Essays, p. 30. tations such as these should be systematically and periodically exposed and pilloried.

From The Examiner. MR. STORY'S NERO.*

MR. STORY, in one of the poems contained in his "Graffiti d'Italia" (a collection of dramatic studies and lyrics constructed somewhat after the model of

The enormities of careless citations of prose are as patent, if not more so, and would need a separate celebration. One of the most extraordinary instances on record of clear misreading of an author is perhaps that of Dean Stanley, who, in a sketch of Hooker, quoted the following as characteristic of Hooker's all-including tolerance and geniality:-"I am persuaded Blackwood and Sons.

* Nero. By W. W. Story. London: William