"These are merely the rough copies," he explained: "and, as soon as I have put in the final corrections--" making a great commotion among the different parchments, "--a semi-colon or two that I have accidentally omitted--" here he darted about, pen in hand, from one part of the scroll to another, spreading sheets of blotting-paper over his
corrections, "all will be ready for signing."
But in making these
corrections he was not altering the figure but simply getting rid of what concealed the figure.
"Short and energetic!" he remarked when he had read over the proclamation which he had dictated straight off without
corrections. It ran:
The Director of the Observatory gathered up the manuscript and went away, explaining that it needed
correction; he had neglected to dot an m.
"These things," he added, looking at Lydgate, "would be to me such relaxation as tow-picking is to prisoners in a house of correction."
Casaubon had himself often pointed to--needed for their correction that more strenuous position which his relative's generosity had hitherto prevented from being inevitable.
Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of an imperfectly informed French critic of our literature) the radical distinction between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its students, yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of our purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which we are not richer than other people.
Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their own.
But our former description of a citizen will admit of
correction; for in some governments the office of a juryman and a member of the general assembly is not an indeterminate one; but there are particular persons appointed for these purposes, some or all of the citizens being appointed jurymen or members of the general assembly, and this either for all causes and all public business whatsoever, or else for some particular one: and this may be sufficient to show what a citizen is; for he who has a right to a share in the judicial and executive part of government in any city, him we call a citizen of that place; and a city, in one word, is a collective body of such persons sufficient in themselves to all the purposes of life.
The prudent housekeeper was again dispatched to bring the unhappy culprit before Mr Allworthy, in order, not as it was hoped by some, and expected by all, to be sent to the house of
correction, but to receive wholesome admonition and reproof; which those who relish that kind of instructive writing may peruse in the next chapter.
I should never get to the bottom--were I to let myself go even now-- of the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private
correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours.
Knowing that those orders are without appeal, and always punctually executed, I prepared myself to receive the
correction I was threatened with, but unexpectedly found the people so charitable as to lend me the money.