The Pall Mall Gazette of yesterday pounced on a most
amusing blunder (to all but the blunderer, who may, we hope, survive it) in last week's Reader. The critic of that journal was reviewing Latham's edition, of Johnson's Dictionary, in which Johnson's well known preface was, as a matter of course, given. The tm-r wary critic, no doubt pressed hard for copy, and without time to read anything beyond the preface, read Dr. Johnson's preface and mistook it for Dr. La,tham's, whereon he commented thus in his "first. notice" :—" In the 'Author's Preface' Johnson has alto- gether disappeared. The brag in this production, when contrasted with the execution of the editor's work, is simply unbearable. We do not wish to kick a man who is down, but we do beg Messrs. Longman to cancel this 'Author's Preface,' and substitute one for it which will do a little more justice.to Johnson's work, and put the present editor's in its proper place, as far as they like below his great predecessor's." It was Dr. Latham that had disappeared, and not Dr. Johnson. There never probably was in all time a more dry, solid, laborious scholar, utterly incapable of boasting, than Dr. Latham. The Pall Mall rather unkindly looks forward to the Reader's "second notice." We feel more delicacy in the matter. If the unhappy man has the literary instinct at all, he will be a wretched exile on board an Australian steamer by this time, distrusted by his fellow-passengers as the victim of cerebral excitement, and unable to express to them that the disease he is suffering from is congestion of Johnson and Latham on the brain. It is tragic.
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