Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 May 1913 — MISTAKES MADE BY AUTHORS [ARTICLE]

MISTAKES MADE BY AUTHORS

Bome of the Amusing and Astonishing Stupidities of Well Known Writers. Not all the . literary stupidities are in Flaubert’s portfolio qf human stupidity, as described and sampled by Guy de Maupassant. One French writer used the startling phrase, “He was seventy years old, and looked twice his age;’’ another, “The two adversaries were placed at equal distance from each other.’’ This sounds like a passage from an American best seller, bat who was It that said:.“With one hand he fondled her hair, and with the other he said to her . . .?*■ It was Corneille the greater who wrote: “This shall cost Pompey his life and his head.” The dramatist Scribe, in his Inaugural speech before the JFrench academy, reproached Moliere with having failed to mention In any of his works the Revocation ol the Edict of Nantea. (This occurred in 1686—when Moliere had been dead 12 yews.) Hugo, apostle of antithesis and local color, makes Charlemagne say in the “Legende dee Siecles:” "You dream, like a clerk in the Borbonne,” an institution founded in 1263. Of the critic Janln it has been written: “He had a horror of ine» actitnde.” All the same Janln makes Bmyrna out to be an Island; Cannes on the Mediterranean to be the central Italian Cannae; the River Rhone to pass through Marseilles —50 miles away.—Paris Revue. * \