Then come the awful game of dice, the sunset, and the instantaneous tropi cal night, when Clomb above the Eastern bar The hornéd moon, with one bright star Now, if the moon rose in the east and gradually clomb the sky, she must have been at or near her full,-opposite the sun. She could not be a horned moon, nor could she have a star within either tip. The crescent moon, with her horns, appears in the western sky, not in the eastern, and is steadily setting and getting lower in the sky from the instant of its appearance. Such, at least, is the fact with nature's moon. But the moon of poetry and romance has no end of eccentricities in the pages of fanciful writers, who shift it around like a bit of stage scenery. Dickens tells of the new moon appearing in the east in the early evening, and more recently Walter Besant, in his "Children of Gibeon," causes a new moon to rise in the east at two o'clock in the morning. Oliver Wendell Holmes laid us all under obligation when he devised his theory of the idiotic area. Every man, says the Autocrat, has a spot in the brain on which an idea alighting makes no impression. He uses the theory to explain the otherwise inexplicable mistakes which people make. Authors find this idiotic area comes frequently into use. Trollope might have pleaded this excuse when he made Andy Scott "come whistling up the street with a cigar in his mouth." So might Jules Verne when at the close of his "Round the World in Eighty Days" he describes his circumnavigating hero as reaching his club, triumphant at the winning of his bet, just as all the clocks in London, “from every steeple, pealed forth ten minutes to ten." Surely Verne knew that the London clocks had no such curious idiosyncrasy. It has been said that everything in "Robinson Crusoe" might be demonstrated mathematically, that the writer, as with the instincts of a Scott or a Shakespeare, had got inside the shipwrecked mariner's mind. Yet even Defoe had his idiotic area. How, for example, did Crusoe manage to stuff his pockets with biscuits, when he had taken off all his clothes before swimming to the wreck? And when the clothes he had taken off were washed away by the tide, why did he not remember that he had all the ship's stores to choose from? How could he have seen the goat's eyes in the cave, when it was pitch dark? How could the Spaniards have given Friday's father an agreement in writing, when they had neither paper nor ink? And, finally, how could Friday be so intimately acquainted with the habits of the bear, when that animal is not a denizen of the West Indian islands? The imitators of "Robinson Crusoe" were even worse. Those readers who can cast back their minds to the days when they read "The Swiss Family Robinson" will recollect the extraordinary fecundity and native wealth of the island in which those lucky waifs resided. Not a fruit but flourished, not an edible bird or beast but inhabited that astounding latitude, and what was even more wonderful than the abundance of incongruous and incompati ble forms of natural wealth was the success of every enterprise which any member of the family undertook. Even the marvellous memory of Macaulay had its idiotic area. In his essay on Warren Hastings, after taking Mr. Gleig to task for the slovenly nature of his biography, he acknowledged that "more eminent men than Mr Gleig have written nearly as ill as he when they have stooped to similar drudgery. It would be unjust to estimate Goldsmith by The Vicar of Wakefield,' or Scott by the Life of Napoleon.'' When the Review came out and Macaulay saw what he had done, he was horror-struck. He had written "The Vicar of Wakefield" instead of "the History of Greece." There was no help for it. Immediate correction was impossible. For three months he had to pose before the world as a critic who thought "The Vicar of Wakefield” a bad book,—a hasty bit of drudgery. But once at least when in the full possession of his faculties the "cocksure Macaulay" stumbled into an unfortunate pitfall. Nor would he ever acknowledge that he was in error, though the error was pointed out at once. This was in his essay on Croker's edition of Boswell. Croker had made himself obnoxious to Macaulay in the House of Commons. "See whether I do not dust that varlet's jacket for him in the next number of the Blue and Yellow," wrote Macaulay to his sister Hannah. He kept his word. The next Edinburgh Review contained the now famous onslaught. It showed an unpleasant animus. It was bitter and envenomed, but it exposed Croker's inaccuracies with ruthless skill, it dusted his jacket so that the skin beneath must have been excoriated. Only once did Jupiter nod. Croker had confessed himself puzzled by the following couplet attributed to Sir William Jones: Six hours to law, to soothing slumber seven, Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven. "Sir William," he said, "has shortened his day to twenty-three hours, and the general advice of ‘all to heaven' destroys the peculiar appropriation of a certain period to religious exercise." Macaulay thereupon declared that he did not think it was in human dulness to miss the meaning of these lines. Sir William distributes twenty-three hours among various employments. One hour is thus left for devotion. The whole point of the couplet consists in the unexpected substitution of "all" for "one." "The conceit is wretched enough," concludes Macaulay, with a parting whack, "but it is perfectly intelligible, and never, we will venture to say, perplexed man, woman, or child before." But it turned out that Sir William Jones wrote "Seven" instead of “Six.” So all this good invective came to naught. Macaulay was undoubtedly made aware of his blunder. It was exposed and commented on by Julius Hare in The Philological Journal. But when he came to republish his essays in book form Macaulay never took any notice of the correction. The passage was neither cancelled nor altered. There it stands to-day, a monument to the nonsense which resentment will lead an able man to write. Was not Howells's idiotic area in the ascendant when he wrote in "Silas Lapham" of "rank and file" as though rank and file were synonymous with officers and men instead of being a military term for men alone, and when he spoke of a gentleman whose "linen was purple and fine," whereas the Bibli cal phrase "purple and fine linen" means purple robes and fine linen? And surely Rider Haggard had no other excuse when in "Mr. Meeson's Will" he made the statement that publishers were subject, like other men, to all the provisions and conditions of the seventh commandment. To be sure, if Haggard were a Catholic he might plead further that according to the arrangement of Latin theology the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" is the seventh commandment. But even then this should have been explained to Anglo-Saxon readers in a foot-note. It seems inevitable that Walter Scott should sometimes err. When an author is throwing off brilliant romances at fever-heat, in electric sympathy with a teeming brain and a tingling pulse, he cannot be expected to be overcareful. No one knew better than he-a famous horseman himself-the limits of endurance in a horse. He makes Wilfred of Ivanhoe advise his enemy the Templar to take a fresh steed for the fierce tilt he was to run with him. Wilfred himself had no chargers of remount; he had but one steed, the gift of Isaac of York, and was compelled to run five courses in rapid succession on the unfortunate animal. Horse and man were both sheathed in armor. The day was hot and sultry. No steed that ever was foaled could have stood the ordeal. But this may be hypercriticism. Is it hypercriticism, also, to point out that in the same novel a full century is dropped in such sort that one of Richard 1.'s knights holds converse with a contemporary of the Conqueror, who was Richard's great-great-grandfather? or that the Fair Maid of Perth goes to mass in the afternoon, whereas mass cannot be celebrated save in the earlier part of the day? And Scott's brilliant imitator, the French improvisator, who was so much more headlong and slapdash in his methods,-Alexander the Great, in short, -can we wonder that he too was not infallible? that he fell into strange errors, blunders, and inconsistencies ? In the opening of his novel of "Monte-Cristo," when the good ship Pharaon arrives at the port of Marseilles, Dantes cries out, "All ready to drop anchor!" Straightway "all hands obeyed. At the same moment the eight or ten men who composed the crew sprang some to the main-sheets, others to the braces, others to the halliards, others to the jib-ropes, and others to the topsail-brails." The eight or ten men would have found it impossible to distribute themselves in this fashion, even if they had not been simultaneously engaged in weighing anchor. The fortune which falls But "Monte-Cristo" is a tissue of inconsistencies. in the way of the hero has all the astounding qualities of Fortunatus's cap. It is big enough, to be sure, in the first place. Four million dollars was an impossible fortune for a cardinal of the sixteenth century to have accumulated. But to Monte-Cristo four million dollars is a mere bagatelle. He scatters it with both hands. He hollows emeralds of priceless value to use them as pill-boxes. He gives away horses with rosettes of magnificent diamonds pinned to their heads. His steward has carte blanche in regard to expendi tures; he must be ready at a moment's notice to supply the costly caprices of his patron, and he plunders that patron with equal sang-froid. Monte-Cristo further allows himself to be preyed upon by brigands and smugglers, and insolvents of all classes. Yet when he talks of settling up his affairs prior to being shot by Morcerf, he finds that after all these inroads his original fortune of four millions is-what does the reader suppose? A million? a half-million? Nay, by some extraordinary process it has not diminished a sou: it has even increased; it has more than duplicated itself: it is now a cool ten million! In the paradoxical lexicon of Monte-Cristo, prodigality is another name for thrift. Charles Lever's geography is sadly at fault. In "Charles O'Malley" he makes Andalusia a province of Portugal, and speaks of Don Emanuel's heiress as possessing an estate in Valencia, forgetting that Valencia lies on the opposite shore of Spain. But this is nothing to Victor Hugo, who airs his topographical knowledge by translating "the Firth of Forth" as "Le Premier des Quatres,"-" the First of the Four." And it is nothing to the various English authors who have dealt with American subjects. In the latter regard the Britisher began early to claim the human privilege of erring. As far back as 1729 Dean Swift talks of Pennsylvania, on no less an authority than William Penn, as a spot that "wanted the shelter of mountains, which left it open to the northern winds from Hudson Bay and the frozen sea, which destroyed all plantations of trees, and were even pernicious to all common vegetables." In "Hand and Glove" Amelia B. Edwards compares her hero to "an overseer on a Massachusetts cotton-plantation." Even Thackeray, who knew America and loved it, and who loved Virginia above all, shows in his "Virginians" that he is but superficially acquainted with the geography and conditions of his favorite State. Though it is just barely possible that a grant might have been made to the Esmonds of a tract extending from the Potomac to the James River, it is quite absurd to imagine that any one estate approaching this in size was ever cultivated from one centre. Yet Madame Warrington is described as shipping tobacco from both rivers. There are other inconsistencies,-notably the contiguity of Castlewood to Mount Vernon and Williamsburg, which are at least one hundred miles apart. Miss Helen Mathers is fond of lugging into her novels the ill-directed results of her reading, and in the effort to appear learned she is continually making the saddest mistakes. Two examples from "Cherry Ripe" must suffice. She refers to Henry VIII. and his six wives "all waiting to have their heads cut off;" and to show that she really believes they all lost their heads, she asks, "Did these murdered wives come stepping softly to his side when he lay a-dying?" She makes her hero speak of Miss Porter, and when this recondite allusion puzzles the heroine, the hero puzzles the reader still more completely by declaring that Dr. Johnson, "apropos of his marriage with that lady," is recorded to have said, "Sir, it was a love-match on both sides." A far worse offender is Ouida, who can never restrain the exuberant expression of her learning. She is the Malaprop of the classics, the Partington of belles-lettres, history, and statistics. She plays sad havoc with the names and doings of the old heathen gods. She talks of "the glory that was Athens', and the grandeur that was Rome's." She dowers her heroes and her heroines with impossible perfections, and places them in impossible surroundings. Wanda lives in a castle in an almost inaccessible Alpine height, where foliage would well-nigh perish, yet the magic of Ouida makes the desert to blossom as the rose, while the steinbok, an animal now extinct in the Tyrol, gambols around it. And is it not Wanda's lover who lives in an equally extraordinary château whose library contains a million volumes? An unimaginative statistician once took the pains to show that a million volumes could not be shelved in any less space than a Colosseum. In one of his "Roundabout Papers" Thackeray acknowledges his manifold shortcomings, blunders, and slips of memory: "As sure as I read a page of my own composition, I find a fault or two, half a dozen. Jones is called Brown. Brown who is dead is brought to life. Aghast, and months after the number was printed, I saw that I had called Philip Firmin, Clive Newcome. Now, Clive Newcome is the hero of another story by the reader's most obedient servant. The two men are as different in my mind's eye-as Lord Palmerston and Mr. Disraeli, let us say." Elsewhere he had to confess that he had resuscitated Lady Kew after having laid the unquiet old dowager in her coffin. Newcome, senior, is colonel and major at one and the same time; Jack Belsize becomes Charles on another page; and Mrs. Raymond Gray, introduced as Emily, is suddenly rechristened Fanny. A good deal of confusion is introduced into "The Newcomes" by a want of agreement between author and artist. While Thackeray jests about Clive's beautiful moustache and whiskers, Richard Doyle persists to the end in representing that young man as entirely destitute of capillary attractions. But, having owned his shortcomings, Mr. Roundabout makes a touching plea for mercy. As he looks on the pages written last month or ten years ago he tells us that he remembers the day and its events; "the child ill, mayhap, in the adjoining room, and the doubts and fears which racked the brain as it still pursued its work. It is not the words I see, but that past day; that bygone page of life's history; that tragedy, comedy, it may be, which our little home company was enacting; that merrymaking which we shared; that funeral which we followed; that bitter, bitter grief which we buried." And, such being the state of his mind, he prays the gentle reader to deal kindly with him. 46 After such a plea it seems almost brutal to call attention to a nice little anachronism in "The Newcomes." Clive, in a letter dated 183-, asks, Why have we no picture of the sovereign and her august consort from Smee's brush?" The answer is easy enough: because there was no Prince Consort until 1840. But if we are to chronicle all the anachronisms in imaginative literature we shall never get through. The very head and front of all offenders was Shakespeare himself. He speaks of cannon in the reign of John, whereas cannon were unknown until a century and a half later; of printing in the time of Henry II.; of clocks-and striking clocks at that-in the time of Julius Cæsar; he makes Hector quote Aristotle, and Coriolanus refer to Cato and Alexander; he introduces a billiard-table into Cleopatra's palace; he dowers Bohemia with a sea-coast, makes Delphos an island, and holds Tunis and Naples to be at an immeasurable distance from each other. Nor were his brother dramatists-his contemporaries and his followers-a whit more careful. Nat Lee talks about cards in his tragedy of "Hannibal ;" Otway makes Spartan notables carouse and drink deep; D'Urfey's ancient Britons are familiar with Puritans and packet-boats; Rymer makes his Saxon heroine pull off her patches when her lover desires her to lay aside her ornaments; Schiller, in his "Piccolomini," speaks of lightning-conductors. When Colman the younger read his drama of "Inkle and Yarico" to Dr. Moseley, the latter exclaimed. "Stuff and nonsense! It won't do." 'Come, let us dance and sing, While all Barbadoes' bells shall ring!' It won't do, sir; there's but one bell in the island." Nevertheless the play did do and even if this terrible mistake had not been pointed out, it would have done all the same. Let us not be Dr. Moseleys. We may amuse an idle hour by pointing out the discrepancies in this or that great author, but we need not imagine that his greatness suffers by any such minute specks and flaws. Mistletoe. That little parasite with the curious white berry, the mistletoe, has long been a puzzle and a mystery to botanists, naturalists, and antiquaries. But we will leave the botanists and naturalists to fight out their battles among themselves, and merely glance at what the antiquaries have to say concerning the origin of the pleasant and of course popular custom of kissing a maid under the mistletoe. It will surprise no one to be told that of old the mistletoe was sacred to love. The Scandinavians dedicated it to Freya, their goddess of beauty and love. Freya united in herself the attributes of Venus and of Proserpine, who was the queen of the dead, and it is curious how the mistletoe has been ir.extricably mixed up with both love and death, the story of Freya and Balder, her son, furnishing a striking illustration. Balder, so the legend goes, dreamed a dream presaging danger to his life, and this dream was a cause of much anxiety to his mother, who, to make sure of fate, exacted a promise from Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and all things springing from them, that they would do no harm to her son. This done, the Scandinavian gods met in their hall, and, placing Balder in their midst, amused themselves by casting stones, darts, lances, and swords at him as he stood. True to their oaths, they fell from him, leaving him unscathed. Loki, the spirit of evil, filled with wonder and envy at the sight, resolved to learn the secret of Balder's invulnerability. Transforming himself into an old woman, he went |