about.[31]

[Footnote 31: One curious service of printers' blunders, of a character
quite distinct from their bibliological influence, is their use in
detecting plagiarisms. It may seem strange that there should be any
difficulty in critically determining the question, when the plagiarism
is so close as to admit of this test; but there are pieces of very hard
work in science, tables of reference, and the like, where, if two people
go through the same work, they will come to the same conclusion. In such
cases, the prior worker has sometimes identified his own by a blunder,
as he would a stolen china vase by a crack. Peignot complains that some
thirty or forty pages of his Dictionnaire Bibliographique were
incorporated in the Siecles Litteraires de la France, "avec une
exactitude si admirable, qu'on y a precieusement conserve toutes les
fautes typographiques."]

There have been, no doubt, cruel instances of printers' blunders in our
own days, like the fate of the youthful poetess in the Fudge family:--

"When I talked of the dewdrops on freshly-blown roses,
The nasty things printed it--freshly-blown noses."

Suchlike was the fatality which suddenly dried up the tears of those who
read a certain pathetic ode, in which the desolate widow was printed as
"dissolute;" and the accident which destroyed a poetic reputation by
making the "pale martyr in his sheet of fire" come forward with "his
shirt on fire." So also a certain printer, whose solemn duty it was to
have announced to the world that "intoxication is folly," whether
actuated by simplicity of soul or by malignity, was unable to resist the
faint amendment which announced the more genial doctrine that
"intoxication is jolly."[32]

[Footnote 32: See this and other cases in point set forth in an amusing
article on "Literary Mishaps," in Hedderwick's Miscellany, part ii.]

A solid scholar there was, who, had he been called to his account at a
certain advanced period of his career, might have challenged all the
world to say that he had ever used a false quantity, or committed an
anomaly in syntax, or misspelt a foreign name, or blundered in a
quotation from a Greek or Latin classic--to misquote an English author
is a far lighter crime, but even to this he could have pleaded not
guilty. He never made a mistake in a date, or left out a word in copying
the title-page of a volume; nor did he ever, in affording an intelligent
analysis of its contents, mistake the