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Misquotations.

Verify your quotations, is good advice. Even the best memory is not always to be trusted. Failing the inclination or the opportunity to verify, refrain from quoting. The habit of loose quotation from memory is a growing one, affecting press, pulpit, and legislature. Some classical passages are so habitually misquoted as scarcely to be known in their correct form, as, for example, Shakspeare's « round unvarnished tale, » and Milton's « fresh woods and pastures new. » In the House of Representatives on 4th August, Sir John Hall made a very strange misquotation. « We all know, » he said, « the lines supposed to be addressed by a lover to his young lady's father:

It may have been right to dissemble her love,
But you need not have kicked me downstairs. »

This is sad nonsense. The clever old epigram is so well known, that it is almost superfluous to quote it:

When late I attempted your passion to move,
؟Why proved you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love—
But ؟why did you kick me downstairs?

No other author is so habitually and cruelly misquoted as good Dr. Watts. Never a day passes but he is unintentionally burlesqued. Almost as we write we find the suggestion in a weekly in the north: « It might be well to reproduce in our churches that old hymn:

Cats and dogs delight to bark and bite
For 'tis their nature to Etc., etc. »

One wonders if the Northern Wairoa cats bark. Dr. Watts is not only misquoted, he is credited with the authorship of all manner of rhymes, good, bad, and indifferent, especially for the young. Even the usually accurate Calverley wrote:

Ere the morn the East has crimsoned,
When the stars are twinkling there,
(As they did in Watts's Hymns, and
Made him wonder what they were.)

« I can only say with Watts, » piously writes a Reefton correspondent to a local paper, « God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. »

The practice of giving wrong authorities is, if anything, more mischievous than that of misquoting. There is an annoying persistence in first impressions. Right or wrong, when once they have secured a hold, they are hard to dislodge. A clergyman who usually gave the safe reference, « the poet, » once departed from his ordinary practice, and attributed a stanza of the hymn « Prayer is the soul's sincere desires to Cowper. One of his hearers, meeting him next day, told him that he had made a slip—that Montgomery was the author. « I believe you are right, » he said; « but somehow I had the idea pretty strongly fixed that it was Cowper. I usually say, 'the poet.' » In a very few weeks, quoting the same hymn, he again gave Cowper as the authority. Mr Cole, the Melbourne bookseller, lately published « The Thousand Best Songs, » and attributed the well-known « Old Oaken Bucket » to Wordsworth. The author was one Samuel Woodworth, an American compositor—addicted, it is said, to liquors more potent than the one whose praises he has sung. American printers are rather proud of the ditty—struck off, like all live songs, at red-heat — and the « old oaken bucket, » somewhat to the mystification of outsiders, figures in certain specimen-books as an accepted Craft emblem. One of these adorns the initial to this article. Our lively contemporary, the Catholic Times, some time ago attributed Linnæus Banks's ballad « I live for those who love me » to Alfred Domett; and recently capped this effort by crediting Tennyson with Charles Kingsley's poem, « The Three Fishers. » This has been outdone by the N. Z. Tablet, which, in attributing Keats's best-known line, « A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, » to Tupper of all people, has fairly « taken the cake. » In the seminaries where such shoddy as « Fontenoy » and « Shamus O'Neil » are declaimed, it would perhaps be unreasonable to expect English literature to receive much consideration. The « godless schools » have the advantage in this respect.

Of Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson wrote: Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit. Of many colonial editors it may be said that they never touch Scripture without perverting it. One of our respected contemporaries the other day said that a certain politician coveted power even as David longed for Naboth's vineyard. Another arrayed David in Sclomon's armor. In very stilted phraseology, and in all seriousness, a Wellington paper this month referred to the Apocalypse as « an ancient writing known to the learned as the Revelation of St. John the Baptist. » One particular phrase is almost invariably misquoted, even from the pulpit. It is found in Matt, xx 12, « thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden, and heat of the day. » This is clear, but the passage is usually changed into « borne the heat and burden of the day »—a reading for which we know of no authority. The Revised Version, it is true, reads, « us, which have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat, » and « the day's burden and heat, » is the rendering of all the foreign versions with which we are acquainted; but though somewhat resembling the popular form, they do not correspond with it. The R.V. gives the form and order of the original words as closely as they can be trans-translated; but the A.V. (following Tyndall) is in better and more idiomatic English. Not long ago a contemporary quoted « In the midst of life we are in death, » as words of Holy Writ. Many people think the passage is in the Bible; but would be puzzled to find it. It is from a grand Latin hymn, a thousand years old, Media vita in morte sumus. Blunt says: « The original composition of the Media vita is traced back to Notker, to whom that of the Dies iræ can be traced, and who was a monk of St. Gaul, of Switzerland, at the close of the ninth century. »

Pulpit misquotations arise sometimes from the incorporation of doctrinal formulæ, and at others from reminiscences of metrical versions and paraphrases. To the first order belong the redundant and awkward phrase « and that to bless them, » so often added to Matt, xviii, 20, and the unwarrantable and audacious addition of the italicised words in Ps. lxxxiv, 9, « and look upon us in the face of thine anointed »; and to the second, a common dilution of Ps. lxv, 3, « Iniquities, we must confess, prevail against us, » where the interpolated words are adapted from the uncouth but faithful rhymed version in use by the Church of Scotland. Apart altogether from the impertinence and irreverence of the practice, misquotation of Scripture is specially to be deprecated. Even when the sense is not perverted, the force is weakened. We repeat: If you must quote, Verify Your Quotations.