Charles Dickens once wrote to a friend: ‘I have distinguished myself in two respects lately. I took a young lady unknown down to dinner, and talked to her about the Bishop of Durham’s nepotism in the matter of Mr Cheese. I found she was Mrs Cheese. And I expatiated to the member for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy—generally conceiving him to be an Irish member—on the contemptible character of the Marylebone constituency and Marylebone representatives.’ Two such mishaps in one evening were enough to reduce the most brilliant talker to the condition of the three ‘insides’ of the London-bound coach, who beguiled the tedium of the journey from Southampton by discussing the demerits of William Cobbett, until one of the party went so far as to assert that the object of their denunciations was a domestic tyrant, given to beating his wife; when, much to his dismay, the solitary lady passenger, who had hitherto sat a silent listener, remarked: ‘Pardon me, sir; a kinder husband and father never breathed; and I ought to know, for I am William Cobbett’s wife!’

Mr Giles of Virginia and Judge Duval of Maryland, members of Congress during Washington’s administration, boarded at the house of a Mrs Gibbon, whose daughters were well on in years, and remarkable for talkativeness. When Jefferson became President, Duval was Comptroller of the Treasury, and Giles a senator. Meeting one day in Washington, they fell to chatting over old times, and the senator asked the Comptroller if he knew what had become of ‘that cackling old maid, Jenny Gibbon.’ ‘She is Mrs Duval, sir,’ was the unexpected reply. Giles did not attempt to mend matters, as a certain Mr Tuberville unwisely did. This unhappy blunderer resembled the Irish gentleman who complained that he could not open his mouth without putting his foot in it. Happening to observe to a fellow-guest at Dunraven Castle, that the lady who had sat at his right hand at dinner was the ugliest woman he had ever beheld; the person addressed expressed his regret that he should think his wife so ill-looking. ‘I have made a mistake,’ said the horrified Tuberville; ‘I meant the lady who sat on my left.’ ‘Well, sir, she is my sister,’ was the response to the well-intentioned fib; bringing from the desperate connoisseur of beauty the frank avowal: ‘It can’t be helped, sir, then; for if what you say be true, I confess I never saw such an ugly family in the course of my life!’

An honest expression of opinion perhaps not so easily forgiven by the individual concerned, as that wrung from Mark Twain, who, standing right before a young lady in a Parisian public garden, cried out to his friend: ‘Dan, just look at this girl; how beautiful she is!’ to be rebuked by ‘this girl’ saying in excellent English: ‘I thank you more for the evident sincerity of the compliment, sir, than for the extraordinary publicity you have given it!’ Mark took a walk, but did not feel just comfortable for some time afterward.

One of the humorist’s countrymen made a much more serious blunder. He was a married man. Going into the kitchen one day, a pair of soft hands were thrown over his eyes, a kiss was imprinted on his cheek. He returned the salute with interest, and as he gently disengaged the hands of his fair assailant, asked: ‘Mary, darling, where is the mistress?’ and found his answer in an indignant wife’s face. ‘Mary darling’ had gone out for the day, and the lady of the house intended by her affectionate greeting to give her lord a pleasant surprise. He got his surprise; whether he thought it a pleasant one he never divulged, but that kitchen knew Mary no more.

A stout hearty-looking gentleman one day made his way from the dock-side at Plymouth to the deck of a man-of-war newly arrived from abroad, and desired to be shewn over the ship. Most of the officers were on shore, and the duty of playing cicerone devolved upon a young midshipman. He made the most of his opportunity, and to have a lark at the expense of the elderly gentleman as he shewed him round, he told him how the capstan was used to grind the ship’s coffee, the eighteen-ton guns for cooling the officers’ champagne, the main-yards for drying the Admiral’s Sunday shirts, and many other things not generally known. When the gentleman had seen all he wanted to see, he handed a card to his kind instructor, saying: ‘Young gentleman, you are a very smart youth indeed, and full of very curious information; and I trust that you will see there is no mistake in this card of mine finding its way to your captain.’ The middy glanced at the bit of pasteboard and read thereon the name ‘Ward Hunt;’ but before he could thoroughly realise the situation, the First Lord of the Admiralty, with a parting nod and pleasant smile, had gone.

Another story, illustrating the awkward results that come of letting the tongue wag freely under a misapprehension regarding other folk’s identity, is told of a London tailor. An aristocratic customer noted for dressing in anything but aristocratic fashion, called to pay his bill. The tailor’s new manager, after receipting the account, handed it back with a sovereign, saying: ‘There’s a sovereign for yourself, and it’s your own fault it isn’t two. You don’t wear out your master’s clothes half quick enough. He ought to have had double the amount in the time; it would be worth your while to use a harder brush.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said his lordship, smiling; ‘I think my brush is a pretty hard one too; his lordship complains of it anyhow.’

‘Pooh! Hard! Not a bit of it! Now I’ll put you up to a dodge that’ll put many a pound in your pocket. You see this piece of wood—now that’s roughened on purpose. You take that, and give your master’s coat a good scrubbing with it about the elbows and shoulders every day; and give the trousers a touch about the knees, and it will be a good five pounds a year in your pocket. We shan’t forget you.’

‘You are very kind,’ quoth the enlightened gentleman. ‘I will impart your instructions to my valet, though I fear while he remains in my service he will not be able to profit by them, as I shall not trouble you with my custom. I wish you good-day.’

We read in Lord Eldon’s Journal: ‘The most awkward thing that ever occurred to me was this. Immediately after I was married I was appointed Deputy Professor of Law at Oxford, and the Law Professor sent me the first lecture, which I had to read immediately to the students, and which I began without knowing a single word that was in it. It was upon the statute applying to young men running away with maidens. Fancy me reading with about one hundred and fifty boys and young men all giggling at the Professor! Such a tittering audience no one ever had.’ The comical coincidence may have been an accidental one; but as the Law Professor must, like the students, have known that his deputy ran away with his Bessie, the chances are against it. The great lawyer was fated to be reminded of the romantic episode of his life. A client whose daughter had been stolen from him, insisted upon the jury being told that a man who could run away with another man’s daughter was a rascal and a villain, and deserved to be hanged. ‘I cannot say that,’ said Scott. ‘And why not, Lawyer Scott—why not?’ inquired the irate father. ‘Because I did it myself!’ was the unanswerable reply.

After doing his office for a young couple, a clergyman was inveigled into proposing the health of bride and bridegroom at the wedding breakfast. He wound up a neat little speech by expressing the hope that the result of the union of the happy pair might prove strictly analogous to that of the bride’s honoured parents. The groom looked angry, the bride went into hysterics, the bridesmaids blushed and became interested in the pattern of the carpet, the master of the house blew his nose with extraordinary violence, and the speaker sat down wondering at the effect he had created; till his better-informed neighbour whispered that the lady was not the daughter of the host and hostess, but a niece who came to live with them when her mother and father were divorced.

During Mr Gladstone’s Premiership, Sir George Pollock called one morning in Downing Street to thank the Prime-minister for making him governor of the Tower. A cabinet council had just assembled; but rather than keep the veteran waiting, Mr Gladstone invited him into the council-chamber and introduced him to his colleagues. Sir George entertained his new acquaintances with a tedious story about a nobleman who had been detected cheating at cards, ending his narration with: ‘They turned him out of all the clubs he belonged to; even the Reform would have nothing more to say to him!’ A way of proving the enormity of the card-player’s offence that must have pleased his hearers amazingly, since all or nearly all of them were members of that famous Liberal club.

The old governor sincerely meant what his words implied. Such is not always the case with utterers of malapropos things. When a note was handed to Dr Fletcher in his pulpit intimating that the presence of a medical gentleman, supposed to be in the church, was urgently required elsewhere, the preacher read the letter out, and as the doctor was making for the door, fervently ejaculated: ‘May the Lord have mercy on his patient!’ A Scotch minister exchanging pulpits with a friend one Sunday, was accosted after service by an old woman anxious to know what had become of her ‘ain minister.’ ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘he is with my people to-day.’ ‘Indeed, indeed,’ said the dame; ‘they’ll be getting a treat the day!’ As flattering a remark as that of the wife of a popular lecturer, who on her lord telling her he was going to lecture at Sheffield, exclaimed: ‘I’m so glad; I always hated those Sheffield people.’

Epitaph writers sometimes display a talent for this kind of double-entendre. A couple of specimens will suffice. The first from Arbroath, running: ‘Here lie the bodies of John, William, Robert, and David Matthews, who all died in the hope of a glorious resurrection—excepting David.’ The other from an American burying-ground:

Although a high authority insists that the lunatic and the lover are of imagination all compact, it would not enter an ordinary lover’s head to tell his mistress that loving her was synonymous with madness, as Steele did when he wrote to his dear lovely Prue: ‘It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love and yet attend business. As for me, all who speak to me found me out, and I must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me;’ but fair Mistress Scurlock doubtless took the dubious flattery in as good part as the great animal painter took the king of Portugal’s odd greeting: ‘Ah, Sir Edwin, I am glad to see you; I’m so fond of beasts.’ An unpleasant way of putting the thing was innocently adopted by the New York car-driver, who, blissfully ignorant that his interlocutor was Mr Beecher, replied to that gentleman’s query whether he did not think it possible to dispense with running the cars all day on Sunday: ‘Yes, sir, I do; but there’s no hope for it so long as they keep that Beecher theatre open in Brooklyn; the cars have to run to accommodate that.’

An American newspaper says: ‘The enthusiastic choir-master who adopted Hold the Fort as a processional hymn, has been dismissed by the minister, who considered it personal when the choir burst forth:

A similar objection might have been raised to the Maine county commissioners quoting Watts’s lines:

when inviting certain lawyers to inspect the new court-house; although they had less reason to complain than Lord Kenyon and Justice Rooke, who while on circuit, came one Sunday to a little village just as the good folks were going to church; an example the two judges followed. Anxious to shew his appreciation of the unexpected honour, the parish clerk searched for a suitable psalm to sing before the service; and at the proper time gave out the first two verses of the fifty-eighth psalm, and the congregation sang:

Here the congregation awoke to the meaning of what they were singing, and left the clerk and the children to offend the ears of the legal dignitaries with:

The performance unlocked the tongues of the astonished judges at any rate; and the churchwardens had some difficulty in convincing them that the apparent insult arose out of the stupidity of the well-meaning clerk.