The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1898-11-24
QUOTATION AND MISQUOTATIoN
(Chicago rimes-Herald.l

Byron in English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers satirizes the critics. who:
Take, hackneyed jokes from Miller, got
by rote,
With just enough of learning to misquoJe.
The truth is. nothing is so common
as misquotation, and the ascription of
familiar proverbs and quotations to
wrong sources. Perhaps the most ia
nous of these latter is the well-known
! God tempers the wind to the shorn
lamb" Nine persons out of ten will
tell you offhand that this is to be found
in the Bible, somewhere in Proverbs
OF course, it is not in the Bible but in
a book that is the very antipodes of the
Bible, and one supposed by some to
De the most immoral book in our Ian
guage. 1t is in The Sentimental Jour
ney," by Lawrence Sterne, and even
there it is stolen, for Sterne stole many
OF his best things 1t is to be found
sun earlier in the writings of George
herbert, who says: To a clOSe-Shorn
| sheep God gives wind by measure"
But 1t goes even further back. An old
French writer has it: "Dieu nlesure lie
1rold a la brebis tondue." God measures
the cold to the shorn lamb.
k. Another common saying, Cleanliness
is next to goodness" is also frequently
ascrlbed to the Bible, but Il is 20 be
found in one of John Wesley.s sermons,
though it is not original with him.
Where he got it is not definitely known,
put very probably from some of the
ancient fathers. Bacon has an express
sion OF similar import, Cleanliness Of
pody was ever deemed to proceed from
Cue reverence to God"
One common quotation that is from
fc liz
always misunderstood. The preacher
IN Ecclesiastes says, I'm the place
where the tree falleth, there it shall
! De- The immediate context, IF the
clouds be full OF rain" shows that
what is meant is that the times and
seasons are in Gods hands and that all
that concerns the husbandman is that
ne must be industrious and not waste
time in observing the winds and the
clouds. The quotation as popularity
given is, AS the tree falls, there shall
II lie, and is taken to mean that what
ever fate happens to one, the divine au-
thority has decreed that it shall so be
meaning that the original does not
bear out.
Another misquotation frequently on
the tongues of men is, When Greek
| meets Greek, then comes the tug of
war This is supposed to mean that
when Greek is arrayed against Greek,
or, In other words, when equals meet
in combat, that the result is a hard
light. Now, the true quotation means
| nothing Of the sort. 1t is to be found
IN Nat Lees tragedy of Alexander the
Great" and is, when Greeks Joined
Greeks, then came the tug of war"
That is, when Athens and Sparta and
the other Greek states combined to-
gether, they were hard to overcome. ,
@ g g
| A common quotation in the mouths of
the politicians is ''VoX popu4i, VoX DER
the voice of the people is the voice of
| God. This is really Derversion of
! passage in Isaiah: "a voice of noise
from the city, voice from the temple,
voice of the Lord that rendereth rec
ompense to his enemies"
| one of the early popes Sylvester II,
/ throws light on the real meaning of
| the expression. In speaking of an ap-
| polntment he had made, he said he
| had been guided by the demands of
! the multitude, but he had done wrong,
for, as the voice of the people had
cried out for the crucifxion of Christ,
| every voice of the people cannot be the
voice of God. Another ancient writer
! says: Nor are those to be needed who
are wont to say 'Vox populi, voX Del
since the tumultuousness of the rabble
is always next door to insanity
/
! preston vogue on the eve OF the
! French revolution. There are few pro-
! verbal sayings in any tongue that con-
| tain so much truth and so much false
hood.
Gray's line, "They kept the noiseless
! tenor of their way" is almost invar-
lably quoted They kept the even tenor
OF their way, which, as descriptive of
the rude forefathers of the hamlet is
! not nearly so DOetical
Matthew Prior, in one of his poems,
says:
That air of harmony and sharp express
Fine by degrees and beautifully less
But the latter line has become a
household proverb as Small by de-
grees and beautifully less, one OF the
few instances where the miscuotation
has improved the form and meaning of
| the expression.
There is a famous line in 'Troilus
and Cressida" that nobody quotes in
the sense in which it is used. in the
play
When Ulysses. arguing with Achilles.
says: One touch of nature makes the
whole world kim he does not mean
that all mankind are drawn together
or animated to noble thoughts by the
exhibition of some fine action, but that
/
est new fashion or thing.
That all with one consent praise new
born gauds,
| Though they are made and nodded of
/ things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than things Ger busted.
/ g @ 81
A very common popular Latin quota
! ton is QUEEN deus vult perdere 9rius
dementat '-whom God would destroy
he first makes mad. The works of Latin
authors would be searched in vain to
find this quotation, but its history as
given in Boswells Life of Johnson ;,
is strange and interesting. The saving
was found written on scrap of uaper
on the table of a gentleman of FASH
Iona Mr.. o. D.-name in full not
known, who had committed suicide
about the year 1850. Its origin at once
became an object of curiosity. and
search was made for it among ali Lafin
writer's, without success. A passage
similar in DurDort, however, was dis
covered in the fragments of Euri-
Dides," which runs as follows: when
divine power prepares evils for d man,
1t first Injuries his mind
The suicide probably had this in his
thoughts when he made the Latin YER
sion that has since been quoted the
world OVER
-------S--Sz1D-o~-
THANKSGIVING TonC Aoo