Chesterton, with a prodigious memory but a constitutional contempt for accuracy that he carried often to unpardonable lengths, quoted Browning copiously, but he quoted him always from memory and often with verbal inacurracy.
I can't agree with Hollis here (though I should add that I'm not sure just how far Chesterton did carry his 'contempt for accuracy!'). Chesterton's willingness both to misquote, and also to defend his misquoting, is one of his most endearing characteristics. As he says somewhere, 'Misquotation shows that a writer's work has become part of the reader'. (Well, something like that.)
Through my own work in a university library, I've witnessed the almost neurotic concern that students (and academics) develop with 'references'. This might lead them to scouring through some massive volume-- or several massive volumes-- to hunt down that one sentence they remember reading, and making sure they have the comma in the right place.
While such meticulous accuracy is highly commendable in engineers and doctors-- we don't want bridges falling down or surgeons taking out the wrong bit-- it seems contrary to the whole atmosphere of liberal education. A layman who flicks through any academic journal printed in the last thirty or forty years (at least) will almost certainly be struck by the pedantry and plodding earnestness of the writing. Chesterton was never more right than when he was struggling against that sort of thing. I think Shakespeare put it best: 'Who cares where the comma goes, dude'?
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