number of pages devoted to one
head. As to the higher literary virtues, too, his sentences were all
carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the
most sensitive kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of ending a
sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the
same five lines, choosing always some judicious method of circumlocution
to obviate reiteration. Poor man! in the pride of his unspotted purity,
he little knew what a humiliation fate had prepared for him. It happened
to him to have to state how Theodore Beza, or some contemporary of his,
went to sea in a Candian vessel. This statement, at the last moment,
when the sheet was going through the press, caught the eye of an
intelligent and judicious corrector, more conversant with shipping-lists
than with the literature of the sixteenth century, who saw clearly what
had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all
pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting
the author. The consequence was, that people read with some surprise,
under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had
gone to sea in a _Canadian_ vessel. The victim of this calamity had
undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophical
equanimity; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, destitute of
the organ of veneration, thoughtlessly asked him about the last new
popular work, as if it were something that he had read or even heard of,
and actually went so far in their contumelious disrespect as to speak to
him about the productions of a certain Charles Dickens. The "Canadian
vessel," however, was a more serious disaster, and was treated
accordingly. A charitable friend broke his calamity to the author at a
judicious moment, to prevent him from discovering it himself at an
unsuitable time, with results the full extent of which no one could
foresee. It was an affair of much anxiety among his friends, who made
frequent inquiries as to how he bore himself in his affliction, and what
continued to be the condition of his health, and especially of his
spirits. And although he was a confirmed book-hunter, and not
unconscious of the merits of the peculiar class of books now under
consideration, it may be feared that it was no consolation to him to
reflect that, some century or so hence, his books and himself would be
known only by the curious blunder which made one of them worth the