ERRAGON, king of Lora (in Scandinavia).  Aldo, a Caledonian chief, offered him his services, and obtained several important victories; but Lorma, the king’s wife, falling in love with him, the guilty pair escaped to Morven.  Erragon invaded the country, and slew Aldo in single combat, but was himself slain in battle by Gaul, son of Morni.  As for Lorma, she died of grief.—­Ossian, The Battle of Lora.

ERRANT DAMSEL (The), Una.—­Spenser, Faery Queen, iii. 1 (1590).

ERRIMA, Greek maiden chidden by her mother for dreaming of Sappho, and Lesbian dances and Delphian lyre, and commanded to

  “rend thy scrolls and keep thee to thy spinning.”

She answers that talk of matron dignities and household tasks wearies her: 

  “I would renounce them all for Sappho’s bay: 
  Forego them all for room to chant out free
  The silent rhythms I hum within my heart,
  And so for ever leave my weary spinning!”

Margaret J. Preston, Old Song and New. (1870).

ERROL (Cedric).  Bright American boy, living with his widowed mother, whose grandfather, Lord Fauntleroy, sends for and adopts him.  The boy’s sweetness of manners and nobility of nature conquer the old man’s prejudices, and win him to sympathy and co-operation in his schemes for making the world better.—­Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1889).

ERROL (Gilbert, earl of), lord high constable of Scotland.—­Sir W. Scott, Fair Maid of Perth (time, Henry IV.).

ERROR, a monster who lived in a den in “Wandering Wood,” and with, whom the Red Cross Knight had his first adventure.  She had a brood of 1000 young ones of sundry shape, and these cubs crept into their mother’s mouth when alarmed, as young kangaroos creep into their mother’s pouch.  The knight was nearly killed by the stench which issued from the foul fiend, but he succeeded in “rafting” her head off, whereupon the brood lapped up the blood, and burst with satiety.

  Half like a serpent horribly displayed,
  But th’ other half did woman’s shape retain. 
  And as she lay upon the dirty ground,
  Her huge long tail her den all overspread,
  Yet was in knots and many boughts [folds] up-wound,
  Pointed with mortal sting.

Spenser, Faery Queen, i. 1 (1590).

ERROR OF ARTISTS, (See ANACHRONISMS).

ANGELO (Michel), in his great picture of the “Last Judgment” has introduced Charon’s bark.

BREUGHEL, the Dutch painter, in a picture of the “Wise Men of the East” making their offerings to the infant Jesus, has represented one of them dressed in a large white surplice, booted and spurred, offering the model of a Dutch seventy-four to the infant.

ETTY has placed by the bedside of Holofernes a helmet of the period of the seventeenth century.

MAZZOCHI (Paulo), in his “Symbolical Painting of the Four Elements,” represents the sea by fishes, the earth by moles, fire by a salamander, and air by a camel!  Evidently he mistook the chameleon (which traditionally lives on air) for a camel.