The third adviser has more influence with the mass of the subjects of King Custom than the other two put together; his name is Fiddlefaddle, the toy-shop keeper; and the other two put him forward to do their worst work. In return, he often uses their names without authority. He took Etymology to witness that _means_ to an end must be plural: and he would have any one method to be a _mean_. But Etymology proved him wrong, King Custom referred him to his Catechism, in which is "a means whereby we receive the same," and Analogy--a subordinate of { 326} Etymology--asked whether he thought it a great _new_ to hear that he was wrong. It was either this Fiddlefaddle, or Lindley Murray[608] his traveler, who persuaded the Miss Slipslops, of the Ladies Seminary, to put "The Misses Slipslop" over the gate. Sixty years ago, this bagman called at all the girls' schools, and got many of the teachers to insist on the pupils saying "Is it not" and "Can I not" for "Isn't it" and "Can't I": of which it came that the poor girls were dreadfully laughed at by their irreverent brothers when they went home for the holidays. Had this bad adviser not been severely checked, he might by this time have proposed our saying "The Queen's of England son," declaring, in the name of Logic, that the prince was the Queen's son, not England's.
Lastly, there is Typography the metallurgist, an executive officer who is always at work in secret, and whose lawless mode of advising is often done by carrying his notions into effect without leave given. He it is who never ceases suggesting that the same word is not to occur in a second place within sight of the first. When the Authorized Version was first printed, he began this trick at the passage, "Let there be light, and there was light;" he drew a line on the proof under the second _light_, and wrote "_luminosity?_" opposite. He is strongest in the punctuations and other signs; he has a pepper-box full of commas always by his side. He puts everything under marks of quotation which he has ever heard before. An earnest preacher, in a very moving sermon, used the phrase Alas! and alack a day! Typography stuck up the inverted commas because he had read the old Anglo-Indian toast, "A lass and a lac a day!" If any one should have the sense to leave out of his Greek { 327} the unmeaning scratches which they call accents, he goes to a lexicon and puts them in. He is powerful in routine; but when two routines interlace or overlap, he frequently takes the wrong one.