Nashville union and American. [volume] (Nashville, Tenn.) 1868-1875, 1869-12-30
A CURIOUS BULL IN I.ROBINSON
CRUSOE.D

MI. William Lee, IN his recently pub
lished work on ''Defoe, his Life and re-
Gently discovered Writings" N0ndon,
HOtten, 1869, thus notices singular
oversight which DefOe allowed to pass in
his few editions of Robinson Crusoe, y
but which his enemies were quick enough
to discover and Tidicule:
81 must here notice, as shortly as pos
sib.e, a controversy into which Defoe was
drawn by the London Journal, on a
matter of trihing moment; but which
seems TO have irTitated him considerably.
Charles GildOn had, in his pamphlet
against Robinson CTusOe, pointed out the
inconsistency that Crusoe was made to
| pull off his clothes, swim from the
island to the wreck, and then FILL
his pockets with biscuits. At that
time four editions of the first volume of
CrusOe had been published, and no reply,
that know of, was made to Gidon, but
| in subsequent editions the text was cor
rected. In some it stands, Il rolled up
part of my clothes on my back :" but in
the other the only alteration is the substi-
tuition of the word Hands instead of
pockets. In the London Journal of
the 4th of Sept, 1925, at which time that
paper is believed to have been written by
Bishop Benjamin Hoadley, there
was an article on the dearth of
news, and the expediency of resort
ing to fiction, however extrayagant, 10
satisfy the craving of the multitude; and
the writer says that books of voyages and
travels, filled with mOnstrOus and incredi-
bic stories, have become popular, because
they satisfied this morbid appetite. He
goes on as follows: eve may remember
that we have been most of us, when
children, wonderfully pleased with the
achievements of Tom Thumb, Jack the
Giant Killer, Don Bellianis of Greece,
The Seven Champions of Chris
tendon, and such like extraordi-
nary heroes; and many of us, in our
more advanced Age, are little less de-
lighted with such books as The Life and
Adventures of Robinson CrusOe, which
seems to have that uncommon Run upon
the Town for Years past, for no other
Reason but that it is a most palpable Lye,
from Beginning to End; and doubt not
the famous Passage of his Swimming to
the Shore Naked, with his Pockets full of
Biscuits, tho most notorious Blunder in
the Author, has passed for a very good
Jest, and been received with abundance
of Pleasure by many of his Readers
UNDERSTANDABLE
"Undisprivacied y What word It's
the newest thing out, in Boston. Mr..
Lowell has, with great labor and sweat,
with the atlantic Monthly for fulcrum,
and very long poem entitled ''The Ca
thedral .''-lUcuS q nOn-fOr lever, pried
it off from the banks of the Charles
river and dropped it with a polysyllable
crash into the tide of the language. Gun
disprivacied ~ 1t means-easy enough
the opposite of undispublicated, and it
is made by process of accretiOn, simple
ascOngelatiOn. The foundation of the word
the basis of this four story pOlysyllablc
with a French roofs privacy" You
take that word TO start with-gO at it with
a club and knock off the end of it
punch it into the shape of an active verb
freeze on the prefix dis, and upon that
track the negative UH-see Just as easy
as rolling off a log. After all, what's the
use of having all these component, con-
stitucnt and simple words, unless once
in a while you can put them to-
gethcr BostOn-fashion - and make q
regular old parallelopiped of a
word, that you can't take to pieces
without nitro-glycerine. Here's this Gun
disprivacied," for instance. What a tri-
umph of verbal architecture that is The
only objection to it is that if it should
happen to drop down into the tropics It's
Liable to thaw and break all to pieces
Hartford Post.