hapter xxix: 'They were now a miserable trio.'

'PERSUASION'

1. Chapter I: The Hampshire and Winchester Editions, following the first
edition, print the opening passage as follows:--

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in
Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own
amusement, never took up any book but the
Baronetage; where he found occupation for an idle
hour and consolation in a distressed one; there
his faculties were roused into admiration and
respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of
the earliest patents; there any unwelcome
sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed
naturally into pity and contempt. As he turned
over the almost endless creations of the last
century, and there, if every other leaf were
powerless, he could read his own history with an
interest which never failed: this was the page at
which his favourite volume always opened.

This obviously makes no sense as it stands; and to no less a light than
Macaulay belongs the credit of putting it right.

Some of his old friends (says Sir G. O. Trevelyan
in his _Life of Macaulay_[373]) may remember how
he prided himself on a correction of his own in
the first page of _Persuasion_ which he maintained
to be worthy of Bentley, and which undoubtedly
fulfils all the conditions required to establish
the credit of an emendation; for, without the
alteration of a word, or even of a letter, it
turns into perfectly intelligible common-sense a
passage which has puzzled, or which ought to have
puzzled, two generations of Miss Austen's readers.

And in a footnote, Sir George says:--

A slight change in the punctuation effects all
that is required. According to Macaulay the
sentence was intended by its author to run thus:
'There any unwelcome sensations, arising from
domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and
contempt as he turned over the almost endless
creations of the last century; and there, if every
other leaf were powerless, he could read his own
history with an interest which never failed. This
was the page at which his favourite volume
opened.'

Whether or not the