QUOTATIONS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sra,—Permit me to differ from "A Constant Reader " as to the propriety of the restriction which he seeks to impose upon the liberty of quotation. It is a liberty which may doubtless be abused, as when a Puritan parson, desiring to rebuke a certain " worldly " arrangement of the feminine coiffure then in vogue under the name of " top-knot," took his text from St. Matt. xxiv., 17 : " Top not come down!" Bat who shall say that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's citation when she first looked upon the turbid waters of the port of Liverpool—" The quality of Mersey is not strained "—was any the less apt or legitimate because it was doubly distorted ? If we are to use the tools of trade only for the precise purpose for which they were designed, there will be very little progress in the world. Shall we be restrained from applying the oft-cited phrase " There were giants in those days," to intellectual giants, because it thus "suggests to the hearer a meaning different from that in- tended by its author " ? Or shall we hesitate to use " cabined, cribbed, confined," in a material, because Shakespeare em- ployed it in a figurative, sense ? The particular quotation whose alleged misuse is the subject of your correspondent's criticism—" One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin" —whatever Shakespeare may have intended to imply by it, contains a striking truth, expressed in a highly poetic and convenient form ; and to argue that to use it otherwise than as Shakespeare conceived it is a "pernicious example," seems to be the extreme of hyper-criticism. As well insist that we must spell the words as Shakespeare spelled them, or, what would be still more confusing, pronounce them as Shakespeare pronounced them.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Berlin, August 30th. VERNON.
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