In the Last Tournament, Tennyson makes Sir Tristram stabbed to death, by Sir Mark in Tintag’il Castle, Cornwall, while toying with his aunt, Isolt the Fair, but in the History he was in bed in Brittany, severely wounded, and dies of a shock, because his wife tells him the ship in which he expected his aunt to come was sailing into port with a black sail instead of a white one.

The poet-laureate has deviated so often from the collection of tales edited by Sir Thomas Malory, that it would occupy too much space to point out his deviations even in the briefest manner.

THACKERAY, in Vanity Fair, has taken from Sir Walter Scott his allusion to Bedredeen, and not from the Arabian Nights. He has, therefore, fallen into the same error, and added two more.  He says:  “I ought to have remembered the pepper which the Princess of Persia puts into the cream-tarts in India, sir” (ch. iii.).  The charge was that Bedredeen made his cheese-cakes without putting pepper into them.  But Thackeray has committed in this allusion other blunders.  It was not a “princess” at all, but Bedredeen Hassan, who for the nonce had become a confectioner.  He learned the art of making cheese-cakes from his mother (a widow).  Again, it was not a “princess of Persia,” for Bedredeen’s mother was the widow of the vizier of Balsora, at that time quite independent of Persia.

VICTOR HUGO, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, renders “the Frith of Forth” by the phrase Premier des quatre, mistaking “Frith” for first, and “Forth” for fourth or four.

In his Marie Tudor he refers to the History and Annals of Henry VII. par Franc Baronum, “meaning” Historia, etc.

Henrici Septimi, per Franciscum Baconum.

VIEGIL has placed AEneas in a harbor which did not exist at the time.  “Portusque require Velinos” (AEneid, vi. 366).  It was Curius Dentatus who cut a gorge through the rocks to let the waters of the Velinus into the Nar.  Before this was done, the Velinus was merely a number of stagnant lakes, and the blunder is about the same as if a modern poet were to make Columbus pass through the Suez Canal.

In AEneid, in. 171 Virgil makes AEneas speak of “Ausonia;” but as Italy was so called from Auson, son of Ulysses and Calypso, of course AEneas could not have known the name.

Again, in AEneid ix. 571, he represents Chorinseus as slain by Asy’las; but in bk. xii. 298 he is alive again.  Thus: 

Chorinaeum sternit Asylas

Bk. ix. 571.

Then: 

  Obvius ambustum torrem Chorinseus ab ara
  Corripit, et venienti Ebuso plagamque ferenti
  Occupat os flammis, etc.

  Bk. xii. 298, etc.

Again in bk. ix.  Numa is slain by Nisus, (ver. 554); but in bk. x. 562 Numa is alive, and AEneas kills him.

Once more, in bk. x.  AEneas slays Camertes (ver. 562); but in bk. xii. 224 Jaturna, the sister of Turnus, assumes his shape.  But if he was dead, no one would have been deluded into supposing the figure to be the living man.