The citizen. (Frederick City, Md.) 1895-1923, 1901-07-26
SLIPS OF THE PEN.
Queer Errors Pcrpctrntcd by Au-
thors Who Knew Better.

thOFs W no IL new Better.
When Mr.. Anthony Trollope pictured
Andy Scott as coming whistling up the
street with a cigar in his mouth" he not
only proved that he had never made per-
sonal experiment of the double feat of
smoking a cigar and whiStlnS a tune
but he was unconscously following in the
steps of still greater writer's who made
their heroes do amazing and impossible
things.
Those who remember their Robinson
Crusoe may recall a most wonderful feat
of this hero of childhood. When he de-
cidcd to abandon the wreck and try to
swim ashore. he took the prccaution to
remove all his clothes. and yet by some
strange magic, of which the secret has
been lost, the author makes him, when
in this condition of nature, fill his peck
cts with biscuits.
The great Shakespeare himself had a
peculiar facility for making the impo5
sihle happen in his plays. One of the
most remarkable of these feats occurs in
the fifth act of "Othcllo," when Desde
mona, after she has been duly smothered
by the Moor, comes to life again and en-
tiers into conversation quite nationally,
even inventing a generous falSehood to
shield him from the consequences of his
crime before she decides 10 die. The i'm
probability of a person recovering con-
sciousness and speech after being smoth-
cred and of dsing after performing such
a feat scarcely needs pointing out.
Shakespeare. too, had a trick of intro
ducing the most glaring anachronisms-
so glarng, in fact, that there is more
fhan SnSr,iaint, thot bo1
been introduced consciously for some I'M
known reason.
For instance, he makes a clock strike
in ancient Rome at a time more than a
thousand years before clocks were in
vented. when such an event would GER
tainly have been the eighth wonder Of
the world
Quite regardless of the evidence of
geography he transports Bohemia to the
seaside, and he introduces printing
press long before the days of Gutenberg.
He calmly introduces a billiard table into
Clcopatra's palace and makes cannon
familiar to King John and his barons.
Thackeray was no mean rival to Shake
spcare in vagares of this kind, but in
his case they appear to have been the re-
suit of pure carccSSncss and forgetfu-
ness. The most fragrant case perhaps is
whore, after burying Lady Kew and eff
fectivcly dismSsing her from the story.
he brings her to life again to help him
out with his plot, and in other cases his
capacity for mixing up the names of his
characters is as confusing as it is won
dcrful.
Emile Zola, in spite of his carefulness,
makes the astonishing statement in one
of his novels (''Lourdes'D that the deaf
and dumb recovered their hearing and
sight, an event which savors very much
of the miraculous.
The moon has innoccntly been the
cause of much laundering on the part of
authors. Wilkie Collins in some mys-
tcrious fashion made it rise on one i'm
portant occasion in the west. Rider
lIaggard, in king Solomon's Mines"
contrives an eclipse of the new moon for
the benefit of his readers. and Coleridge
ingcniously places a star between the
horns of the crescent moon as she rises
in the east.-Tit-Bits.