e more annoying to authors and publishers than errors of
the press; and yet those who are unskilled in the art of printing, can
scarcely conceive the difficulty of avoiding them. The art of proof
reading with perfect accuracy is an high and difficult attainment. To
arrive at ordinary accuracy in a daily newspaper, requires the reading
and correction of at least two proofs; and even then an editor, who has
not become case hardened, by long practice and long endurance, will
often be shocked at the transformation of sense into nonsense, or the
murdering of one of his happiest conceits, or the plucking of the point
out of one of his neatest paragraphs, by a typographical error.

In the early stages of the art of printing, typographical errors were
far more numerous than in books of modern execution, where there is a
real effort to attain to ordinary accuracy. It was then very common for
a volume of ordinary size to contain page upon page of _errata_ at the
close. One of the most remarkable instances of this kind was the curious
treatise of Edward Leigh, 'On Religion and Learning,' published in 1656.
At the close of the work were two folio pages of corrections in very
minute characters. The author himself complains as follows: 'We have no
Plantier or Stevens (two celebrated printers of another day) amongst us;
and it is no easy task to specify the chiefest _errata_; false
interpunctions there are too many; here a letter wanting, there a letter
too much; a syllable too much, one letter for another; words joined,
which should be severed; words misplaced, chronological mistakes, &c.'

Leigh's case, however, was not so hard as that of a monk, who wrote and
published the 'Anatomy of the Mass,' in 1561. The work itself contained
only one hundred and seventy-two pages, to which were added FIFTEEN
pages of _errata_. The pious monk wrote an apology for these
inaccuracies, which, if true, proved that his case was indeed a cruel
one--clearly proving, moreover, that even if the devil had originally
assisted Doctor Faustus and Gutenberg in the invention, his brimstone
majesty very soon became sick of his bargain. The monk avers that he
wrote the work to circumvent the artifices of Satan, and that the devil,
ever on the alert, undertook to circumvent him. For this purpose Satan,
in the first place, caused the MS. to be drenched in a kennel, until it
was rendered comparatively illegible; and, in the second place, he
compelled the printers