23 FEBRUARY 1934, Page 6

In his admirably phrased wireless tribute to King Albert on

Sunday, Sir John Simon—I wonder how many of his hearers noticed it—made one minor slip. Quoting, most appropriately, Shirley's well-known lines, he made a singular word plural, thus : The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things, There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hands on kings.

But what Shirley wrote was " his icy hand." And what a difference. In the singular the fateful remorseless touch that ends all things ; in the plural the idea of violence and seizure and struggle. Tenniel's historic cartoon, " General Fevrier Turned Traitor " (of Czar Nicholas I, who died in the second February of the Crimean War), might have had Shirley's actual line as its text, but never the inaccurately amended line.