can still be read with pleasure from the
charm of the author's style.

Some authors are so careless in the
construction of their works as to contradict in
one part what they have already stated in
another. In the year 1828 an amusing
work was published on the clubs of
London, which contained a chapter on
Fighting Fitzgerald, of whom the author
writes: ``That Mr. Fitzgerald (unlike his
countrymen generally) was totally devoid
of generosity, no one who ever knew him
will doubt.'' In another chapter on the
same person the author flatly contradicts
his own judgment: ``In summing up the
catalogue of his vices, however, we ought
not to shut our eyes upon his virtues; of
the latter, he certainly possessed that one
for which his countrymen have always
been so famous, generosity.'' The scissors-
and-paste compilers are peculiarly liable
to such errors as these; and a writer in
the _Quarterly Review_ proved the _Mmoires

de Louis XVIII_. (published in 1832) to
be a mendacious compilation from the
_Mmoires de Bachaumont_ by giving examples
of the compiler's blundering. One
of these muddles is well worth quoting,
and it occurs in the following passage: