The daily dispatch. [volume] (Richmond [Va.]) 1850-1884, 1866-05-05

| COMICAL BLUSDERS or A FRENCH AU-
TuoR.-Victor Hugo, the hero of Notre
Dame de Paris, les MiseraJles, Les Chan
sons des Bois, and les TrdraiHe,rs de Ia
IMcr, is gaining for himself new celebrity,
and has proved to the complete satisfac-
tion of his Anglo-Saxon readers that his
admiration for English institutions has not
| taught him the value or meaning OF the
plainest idiomatic English.
OF course we remember the acute
Frenchmam who translated cloves Last
Shift " as La de,niere ctemise de PAmo,r
but this is surpassed by NJ. Hugo when he
| turns the well-known "Firth of Forth !"
into " In premiere de Ia qudtrieme.
In the "Toilers of the Sea" NJ. Hugo
alIudes tothe American, or rather Yankee,
custom of giving SoJriquets or nicknames
to distinguished men, and in Book VI,
among other things, he informs us that Ben
ton was known as le cieLr Lingot Generai
| Taylor as le uie,Gr Zach Harrison as te
uie,u Tip, in allusion to Tippecanoe Van
Burcn, le petit Sorcier; Seward" buy te
petit, because he first caused to be issued
small "billets" de banque /; and Clay, above
all, le qarc0n de moulin q Ia Batafre; while
Winfield Scott was called " Vite-une-aS-
Siette de Soupe," CONNIE Sa premiere pe'See
dpres auofr BATH les Anglais Chippewa.
Now, it will be remembered that the
"Toler of the Sea " works his miracles In
1872, and the persons who then made the
remarks from which we quote must there
| fore have been gifted with extraordinary
prescience General Taylor was not
dubbed "Old Zack until 1916; Mr.. Van
Buren, was not termed the Little Magi-
clan" until 1882 while it was at the
commencement of the Mexican war that
| Winfield Scott, in writing to Secretary
Marcy said, 81 have just received your
letter, and after swallowing q hasty plate
! Of soup, hasten to answer it," or words to
! that effect. This certainly did not occur
at the battle of Chippewa, which took place
in the war of 1872. But neither of them
is so strange as that Henry Clay should
have been called, according to NJ. Hugo,
"the Milcr's Boy, with the "ScdrS'' or
/ q" SlaSheS." The learned Frcnchman had
evidently not the most remote idea of the
SlaShcs" of Hanover, and, with charac-
tcristic courage, determined that Harry
of the Slashcs" could mean nothing but
"Harry with the SldShed face" Again,
Mr.. Seward was not called "Little Billy"
in alluSion to any " little bdRetS de banque," !"
with which he had no connection, but as a
compliment to his shrewdness and keen
Sagacity.
Woe is me! Who shall now growl be-
cause Shakespeare trippcd occasionally, or
| because even Homer sometimes was caught
mapping These mistakes of NJ. Hugo's
might have been readily avoided; and they
are thus far worse than such anachronlsms
as the boom Of the cannon in Handel's Dead
March,; Albert Durer's Centurion smoking
q pipe Of tobacco while st. Peter is deny
/ ing the Saviour; the Dutch Abraham who
is about to shoot Isaac with blumderJnSS J;
I Tintorctto's painting ofthe Israelitcs, armed.
,cih long rifles, gathering mamma in the
wilderness or, last of all, the painting OF
the Garden Of Eden, where Adam and
Eve stand in the foreground, while in the
background stands conspicuously Ger
man Stulcnt, in hunting costume, d,Say en-
gaged in shooting ducks.