Next Thing, They'll Be SayingThat There's No Santa Claus

Oh dear, this debunking stuff is getting out of hand.

The correction of misquotations is often a relief. It is good to learn that the Duke of Wellington could not have made the foolish remark that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton"; apart from the absence of evidence, the school's fields were not used for organized sports when he was a schoolboy in the 1780s, and in any case he never played on them. But sometimes it is sad to find that well-remembered sayings--pithy, pungent, and redolent of the speraker--were never uttered, that Oliver Cromwell did not dismiss the Rump Pariament with the words "Take away these baubles," that he never told the painter Peter Lely to depict him "warts and all." These are the historical equivalents to learning that Sherlock Holmes never said "elementary, my dear Watson," or that Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca does not say "Play it again, Sam."

Now comes an even greater shock. ...

That's the excellent David Gilmour in the New York Review of Books, setting us up for the proposition that Henry Stanley never said "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" See Gilmour, "The Restless Conqueror," a review of Tim Jeal's biography of Stanley; NYRB Dec. 6, 2007 at 47.