I dare say, it will be to the public, the faulty
line ran thus:

Thy waters washed them power when they were free,
And many a tyrant since.

The MS. of another of Byron's poems
rectifies a misprint which has been allowed to
pass current in all the hitherto published
editions of his works. It occurs in the Prisoner
of Chillon:—

And thus together, yet apart,
Fetter'd in hand, but pin'd in heart——

For pin'd, read join'd, which completes the
antithesis.

An author may sometimes be indebted for
an idea to his printer. The story that is told
of Malherbe is a case in point. In his
celebrated epistle to Du Perrier, whose daughter's
name was Rosette, he had written:— "Et
Rosette a vécu ce que vivent les roses."
("And Rosette has lived as the roses live.")
But the printer, who found the MS. difficult
to read, put Roselle instead of Rosette.
Malherbe, reading the proof, was struck by
the change, and modified his verse as follows:—
"Et Rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses."
("And a Rose, she has lived as the roses live.")
The comparison to the rose in the first instance
adds greatly to the beauty of the image.

Misprinted dates occur very often, and
sometimes cause considerable confusion in the
reader's mind. In the last number of the
Quarterly Review, in a review very admirably
written, of the account of Corsica, by
Gregorovius, mention is made of Sampiero, the
famous Corsican Condottiero. He was, says
the reviewer, "born A.D. 1498 at Bastelica, a
village in the mountains near Aiaccio."
After speaking of his military services in
Italy, he adds:— ''While thus acquiring
distinction in foreign countries, he was not
unmindful of his own. He returned home in
1597, and his reputation as a soldier supplying
the place of titles and ancestry, won for him
a noble bride— Vannina, daughter and heiress
of Francis Ornano, a principal noble of the
island." Vannina must have had a singular
taste to select for her bridegroom a gentleman
of the mature age of ninety-nine. I must
observe that there is nothing in the context
which helps one to affix the right date,
though it is afterwards said that he died in
fifteen hundred and sixty-seven, exactly thirty
years before he married his blooming bride,
whom, in the meantime, he murdered.
Misprints of this description make people do
strange things after their deaths. In a review
which I saw lately in a weekly paper,
reference is made to a very pleasant letter from
Swift to Arbuthnot, giving an excellent
account of the mode of life of the former. It
is dated (by the printer) "on or about 1773,"
from which it would appear that it was
written by the ghost of Swift to the ghost of
Arbuthnot, the former having died in
seventeen hundred and forty-five, and the
latter in seventeen hundred and thirty-three.

What makes this misprint the more absurd
is, that the letter consists chiefly of details
respecting eating and drinking and the cheapness
of living—not in the other world, but in
Ireland. The Builder, a few weeks since, or
the Globe quoting the paragraph, says that
what Raffaelle did in his "brief life" was
"marvellous." So it was, but then Raffaelle
did not live, as the paragraph stated, to be
fifty-seven years of age. Here it is easy to
rectify the error, the words being in figures,
and a five inserted in the place of a three.
But it only shows how careful you should be
in your comments when your printers are
apt to stumble. Apropos of the Globe, the
following passage appeared in its impression
of January, the eighteenth ult.:— "Our printer
yesterday committed a serious error in giving
our extract from the Registrar-General's
return. He makes us say that the inhabitants
of London suffer at present from a high rate
of morality." About the same period the
Court Journal made a somewhat similar
lapsus. A bride in high life was said to have
been accompanied to the altar by tight bridesmaids.
For the sake of the young ladies
referred to, I beg to say that the words in
italics was intended to be eight. An error in
the Morning Chronicle in the year eighteen
hundred and twenty-nine must have caused
many fruitless references to the Peerage. It
reported that a magnificent banquet had been
given by the Duke of Pork.

In the Daily News of the seventh of
February, a mistake— rather than a misprint
—  occurred, which realised Sir Boyle Roche's
ideas of the capacity of a bird, and almost
equalled the supposition of Mrs. Malaprop.
The ministerial secessions were on the tapis,
and the paper was made to say, "The late
Chancellor of the Exchequer is in favour of
retaining office, but Mr. Gladstone is inclined
to retire from the ministry." For a politician,
however, this was not a very inapplicable
  mistake. It resembled the distinction between
the "governor" and "father," in Sheridan's
Critic. Misprints en bloc are occasionally to
be met with. In the Morning Chronicle of
the twenty-ninth of January last, there was
an account, on the fifth page, of Cardinal
Wiseman's voyage from Civita Vecchia to
Marseilles, with a description of a fearful
storm, which was described in detail, with
all due circumstantial sobriety. The next
  paragraph began: "No doubt, many persons
will disbelieve this story, as many persons
disbelieved the story of Louis Napoleon's
marriage with Mdlle. de Montijo, when it
was first announced." "This story!" What
was it? Had Cardinal Wiseman been saved
from a tempest by floating on his paletot, like
Mr. Newman's favourite saint? To discover
what seemed so hard to believe, it was necessary
to turn to the eighth page of the same
impression, where, in the Paris news of the
day before, it was stated that the Count de
Morny is the uterine brother of the Emperor.