Twopenny Damn, a favorite oath with the Duke of Wellington, who was accustomed to convey in this form of speech his estimate of the persons and things he held in contempt. When asked by the government of the day what he thought of the proposal on the part of the French government to be allowed to remove Napoleon's bones from St. Helena, he replied, "Well, I don't see why they should not have his bones if they want them. Why should we object? They'll say we're afraid. But I don't care what they say. Who cares what they say? I don't care a twopenny damn what they say." An effort has been made to emasculate this famous phrase by explaining that damn in this connection is simply a corruption of the name of a very harm. less Indian coin, a dám, which bore different values at various dates and indiffering localities, but which was originally a sixteenth part of a gold mohur. But, as the duke was no scholar, he was probably not aware of this fantastic origin; and even if he had been, and were anxious to avoid the imputation of swearing, he would surely have taken the precaution of writing the word dám. And he certainly would not have written "twopenny dám," for, whatever the original value of the dám, it had so far back as the time of Akbar. (1542-1605) ceased to be worth more than the fortieth part of a rupee, and consequently in the duke's time was of far less value than twopence: so that twopenny damn" would have conveyed precisely the opposite meaning to that which he intended to convey. The St. James Gazette was in recent times dubbed "the Twopenny Damn" on account of the intensity of its language and sentiments, especially where Mr. Gladstone and what it called "the latter-day Radicals" were concerned.

Typographical Errors. Nothing can be so disheartening to a writer as to find his pet phrases turned into nonsense by the intelligent compositor. "The printer of Longfellow's Dante," says Colonel T. W. Higginson, "told me that the poet had looked forward with eager anticipation to its appearance, and when the first volume of the sumptuous book was laid upon the breakfast-table he opened at once upon-a misprint. It was many weeks, my informant said, before the poet could revert with any satisfaction to what he then regarded as his greatest work." Baron Grimm, in his memoirs, relates the not improbable story of a French writer who died in a fit of anger when he found that his favorite work, revised by himself with great care, had been printed with more than three hundred errors, half of them made by the corrector of the press. But it is a little more difficult to swallow the anauthenticated anecdote of the Italian poet who, when on his way to present a copy of verses to the Pope, found a mistake of a single letter, which broke his heart of chagrin, so that he died the day after.

We can sympathize with the author of a religious work mentioned by D'Israeli, which consisted of only one hundred and seventy-two pages, of which fifteen were devoted to errata. We can even pardon the vanity which led him to imagine that Satan, fearful of the influence which the book might wield, had tampered with the types, and that the very printers had worked under the same malign influence.

Nevertheless, it is easy to find a less startling explanation for the ordinary typographical errors. Blunders of this sort may be roughly grouped under three heads errors of the ear, errors of the eye, and errors arising from what printers call "a foul case."

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A compositor while at work reads over a few words of the copy and retains them in his memory until his fingers have picked up the necessary types. While the memory is thus repeating a phrase, it is only natural for certain words to be supplanted by others similar in sound: thus, "mistake" might In type be turned into "must take," as, in fact, it was in the first folio of Hamlet," Act iii., Sc. 1, “idle votarist" (Timon, Act iv., Sc. 3) into "idol

votarist," and "long delays, Titus," into "long days." The eye often deceives the compositor, especially when the copy is more or less illegible. Take away a dot, and "this time goes manly" (Macbeth, Act iv., Sc. 3) becomes "this tune goes manly." The third class of errors need more explanation. A compositor works at what is called “a case,” a wooden drawer divided into numerous receptacles, each containing one letter only, say all a's or all b's. When from a shake or other accident the letters become misplaced, the result is technically known as a "foul case." The compositor's fingers may, under these circumstances, readily pick out the wrong letter from the right box without his being conscious of the fact.

These are mistakes to which even the intelligent compositor is liable; but it is hardly necessary to say that all compositors are not intelligent. The machine printer, or "blacksmith," as he is technically called, is a familiar figure in every printing-office. It is he who makes a hurried guess at the copy before him, without caring whether it makes sense or not; who substitutes "comic" for "cosmic," "human" for "known," "plant" for "planet," "I am better" for "Gambetta," "no cows, no cream" for "no cross, no crown," and "shaving the queen" for "shoving the queer." This is the sort of printer who made a distinguished traveller die "in the richness of sin" instead of "the interior of Asia," and who described a Chicago exquisite as one "whose manners would alarm a drowning man," when what the writer really said was that they "would adorn a drawing-room."

Richard A. Proctor records the most remarkable change the printers ever arranged for him as having occurred in the proof of a little book on “Spectroscopic Analysis," which he wrote for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The words which in the work itself now appear, as they were certainly written, Lines, Bands, and Striæ in the violet part of spectra," were printed in the proof "Links, Bonds, and Stripes for the violent kind of spectres."

The prohibitionist who wished to say that “drunkenness is folly" must have been seriously disconcerted when the printer made him announce that "drunkenness is jolly;" and we know that an editor who wished to compliment a soldier as "a battle-scarred veteran" was so deeply grieved when he found the types had made him speak of "a battle-scared veteran" that the next day he inserted an apology, and an erratum which read, “the bottlescarred veteran."

"I remember," says a writer in American Notes and Queries, “to have written something about a concert at which was sung Millard's Ave Maria,' and it actually appeared that Miss So-and-so had sung with much feeling Mulligan's Avenue Maria.' At a musicale in the same neighborhood a young lady played upon the piano a ballad in A flat major. The local paper had it that she had sung a ballad called 'A fat major.'

Two very old stories are worth repeating for their peculiar excellence. A Scotch newspaper, reporting the danger that an express-train had run in consequence of a cow going upon the line, said, "As the safest way, the engineer put on full steam, dashed up against the cow, and literally cut her into calves.' In the earlier half of this century a London paper announced that Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were shooting peasants in Ireland.

Worth quoting also are the familiar lines in Moore's "The Fudges in England:"

But a week or two since, in my Ode upon Spring,
Which I meant to have made a most beautiful thing,
Where I talked of the "dew-drops from freshly-blown roses,"
The nasty things made it "from freshly-blown noses!"
And once when, to please my cross aunt, I had tried

To commem'rate some saint of her clique, who'd just died,

Having said he "had takʼn up in heaven his position,"
They made it he'd "tak'n up to heaven his physician!"

Genuine typographical errors are amusing enough, without the invention of "fake" ones, but Mr. Pycroft, in his "Ways and Means of Men of Letters," seems to have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for such a fake. He represents himself as having held a conversation with a printer, who said, "We utterly ruined one poet through a ridiculous misprint. The poet intended to say, 'See the pale martyr in a sheet of fire,' instead of which the line appeared as 'See the pale martyr in his shirt of fire.' The reviewers, of course, made the most of so entertaining a blunder, and the poor poet was never heard of more in the field of literature." The line alluded to probably occurs in Alexander Smith's poem of "A Life Drama," as follows:

The simile is a very fine one, and probably was never misprinted nor adversely criticised. At all events, it is quite certain that the poor poet was not banished by the mishap from the field of literature.

Sometimes the omission or the transposition of a punctuation-mark has made exquisite nonsense of a sentence. Thus, in the printing-office of a religious journal, a compositor took it upon himself to print the familiar passage of Scripture thus: "The wicked flee, when no man pursueth but the righteous, is as bold as a lion." In a report of a Delmonico dinner this toast was said to have been given: "Woman-without her man, is a brute." A New York editor thus introduced some verses: "The poem published this week was composed by an esteemed friend who has lain in his grave for many years for his own amusement;" but here the error is partly chargeable upon the awkward construction of the sentence. Not so in the following instance from a modern sensational novel: "He enters on his head, his helmet on his feet, sandals on his brow, there was a cloud in his right hand, his faithful sword in his eye, an angry glare he sat down." A ludicrous mistake of a somewhat similar order was once made by a clergyman of a parish, to whom the wife of one about to sail on a distant voyage sent a note intended to express the following: "A husband going to sea, his wife desires the prayers of this congregation;" but the good matron was not skilled in spelling or punctuation, and the minister was short-sighted, so he read, "A husband going to see his wife, desires the prayers of the congregation."

Considering the misapprehension which may arise from false punctuation, it is not astonishing that when Timothy Dexter (see T. D. PIPES) wrote his famous book, "Pickle for the Knowing Ones," he left out all marks of punctuation from the body of his work, and at the end filled five pages with commas, semicolons, periods, dashes, etc., with which he advised the reader to pepper and salt his literary dish as he chose.

As examples of errors clearly due to bad writing, it may be mentioned how Horace Greeley, writing something about suburban_journalism advancing, found it transposed by the type-setter into "Superb Jerusalem Artichokes." In the London Times a Westminster speech was made to close with this impressive peroration: "We have broken our breeches, we have burned our boots; honor, no less than other considerations, forbids us to retreat." When Mr. Gladstone was represented as being described by one of his admirers as the spout of the Liberal party, we should understand "spirit" to be intended. A common error resulting from bad penmanship is the substitution of letters for figures, or the reverse: thus, in the report of a coal-market, where the writer intended to say that there was an over-supply of egg size, the types said that there was an over-supply of 299; similarly, where a writer described

a house with zigzag staircases, he was made to give it the extraordinary number of 219,209 staircases.

In an obituary notice of Sidney Godolphin Osborne, the London Times described him as the author of the celebrated tract "No Go," when what the writer meant was the tract No. 90. But no similar excuse can be urged for

the printer who made Tennyson's famous lines read,—

Into the valley of death
Rode the 600.

The following errors may spring from the same source. A quack doctor advertises an "infernal remedy;" a grocer gives notice of the arrival of an invoice of "boxes of pigs" from Smyrna; a New York landlord announces a "louse to let with immediate possession ;" and in the report of an inquest held on the body of a glutton, the verdict, "suffocation," was printed, with more truth than was intended, "stuffocation." In making up newspapersthat is, in piecing together paragraphs into columns-two separate items may sometimes be jumbled together with amazing results. Thus, the New Haven Journal announced in one paragraph that "The large cast-iron wheel, revolving nine hundred times a minute, exploded in that city yesterday after a long and painful illness. Deceased was a prominent thirty-second degree Mason," and in another that "John Fadden, a well-known florist and realestate broker of Newport, Rhode Island, died in Wardner Russell's sugarmill at Crystal Lake, Illinois, on Saturday, doing $3000 damages to the building and injuring several workmen severely."

An English paper, however, produced a far more ludicrous conglomeration. Dr. Mudge had been presented with a gold-headed cane, and the same week a patent pig-killing and sausage-making machine had been exhibited in the village of which he was pastor. The gentleman who made up the forms got the two locals entangled in the following appalling manner: “Several of the Rev. Dr. Mudge's friends called upon him yesterday, and after a conversation the unsuspecting pig was seized by the hind leg, and slid along a beam until he reached the hot-water tank. His friends explained the object of their visit, and presented him with a very handsome gold-headed butcher, who grabbed him by the tail, swung him round, cut his throat from ear to ear, and in less than a minute the carcass was in the water. Thereupon he came forward, and said that there were times when the feelings overpowered one, and for that reason he would not attempt to do more than thank those around him for the manner in which such a huge animal was cut into fragments was simply astonishing. The doctor concluded his remarks, when the machine seized him, and in less time than it takes to write it the pig was cut into fragments and worked up into delicious sausage. The occasion will be long remembered by the doctor's friends as one of the most delightful of their lives. The best pieces can be procured for tenpence a pound, and we are sure that those who have sat so long under his ministry will rejoice that he has been treated so handsomely."

The mere running together of two sentences into one paragraph may also be productive of unintentional amusement. A French newspaper had a good specimen of this kind of mixture: "Dr. X. has been appointed head physician to the Hôpital de la Charité: orders have been issued by the authorities for the immediate extension of the Cimetière de Parnasse."

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A female compatriot of the irrepressible George Francis Train addressed this remonstrance to a Buffalo paper: By some fantastic trick of your typesetter my speech in St. James's Hall on Saturday evening is suddenly terminated, and so linked to that of Mr. Train that I am made to run off into an entirely new vein of eloquence. Among many other exploits, I am made to

boast that I neither smoke, nor chew, nor drink, nor lie, nor steal, nor swear, as if such accomplishments were usual among American women; and wherever I refer to my honored countrymen as 'white males,' I am reported as having addressed them as 'white mules.' All these are very good jokes, if credited to the printer's devil, but not to those who represent an unpopular idea and carefully weigh their words."

Sometimes mistakes have been made by the officiousness of the printer or proof-reader in endeavoring to correct what seemed to him mistakes in the copy. In a quotation of Gay's well-known allusion to Martha and Teresa Blount as "the fair-haired Martha and Teresa brown," the printer thought proper to supply brown with a capital B. Again, in Pope's note on " Measure for Measure," which states that the story was taken from "Cinthio," Dec. 8, Nov. 5 (eighth decade and fifth novel), the wise typo filled out these abbreviations so that they read December 8, November 5.

A momentous typographical error, if we are to take the word of the historian Kinglake, was that which gave to Napoleon III. his title. Kinglake says that just before the coup d'état, a minister of the Home Office, in announcing to the public, wrote, "Que le mot d'ordre soit Vive Napoléon !!!" The printer took the exclamations for "III," and so the proclamation went out, was copied by the press, and became incorporated in public speech. It was no time for explanations, and it was in this way that the nephew of his uncle adopted the title.

Recently the readers of the New York Herald were startled to learn from a cable despatch that Cardinal Newman always regretted that he had attacked "Charles King's legs" with so much acerbity. And, not content with this, the same paper went on to speak of "woman's influence" in lieu of "Newman's influence."

But no more horrible specimen of this sort of blunder was ever committed than one which is credited to a Massachusetts paper. At the close of an extended and highly eulogistic obituary notice of a deceased lawyer, the reporter desired to say that "the body was taken to Hull for interment, where repose the remains of other members of the family." By mistake the letter e was substituted for the u in Hull, changing the sense of the sentence to such a degree that no extra copies of that issue of the paper were ordered by the family of the dead lawyer.

It is believed that the only books which are typographically perfect are an Oxford edition of the Bible, a London and Leipsic Horace, and an American edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy." The University of Oxford had a standing offer of a guinea for each error that might be found in the first of these books. Many years elapsed and no one claimed the reward. But recently an error was discovered by a lynx-eyed reader, the reward was paid and the error corrected, and the book is now believed to be typographically without spot or blemish.

Ben Jonson was once requested to revise some proofs full of typographical and other errors, but he declined, and recommended that they should be sent to the House of Correction. No doubt many weary authors would like to see proofs, printers, and proof-readers all condemned to the same place.

U.

U, the twenty-first letter and fifth vowel in the English alphabet, originally invented by the Greeks as a supplement to the alphabet they had derived from the Phoenicians. At first they wrote it indifferently V or Y, but finally