is a jet-black
shield, with an Ethiopian for crest, and Ethiopians for supporters; and
Apiarius has a neat little cut representing a bear robbing a bee's nest
in a hollow tree. Most instructive of them all, Ascensius has bequeathed
to posterity the lively and accurate representation, down to every nail
and screw, of the press in which the great works of the sixteenth
century were printed, with the brawny pressman pulling his proof.

Collectors there have been, not unimportant for number and zeal, whose
mission it is to purchase books marked by peculiar mistakes or errors of
the press. The celebrated Elzevir Caesar of 1635 is known by this, that
the number of the 149th page is misprinted 153. All that want this
peculiar distinction are counterfeits. The little volume being, as
Brunet says, "une des plus jolies et plus rares de la collection des
Elsevier," gave a temptation to fraudulent imitators, who, as if by a
providential arrangement for their detection, lapsed into accuracy at
the critical figure. How common errors are in editions of the classics,
is attested by the one or two editions which claim a sort of
canonisation as immaculate--as, for instance, the Virgil of Didot, and
the Horace of Foulis. A collector, with a taste for the inaccurate,
might easily satiate it in the editions so attractive in their deceptive
beauty of the great Birmingham printer Baskerville.

The mere printers' blunders that have been committed upon editions of
the Bible are reverenced in literary history; and one edition--the
Vulgate issued under the authority of Sixtus V.--achieved immense value
from its multitude of errors. The well-known story of the German
printer's wife, who surreptitiously altered the passage importing that
her husband should be her lord (Herr) so as to make him be her fool
(Narr), needs confirmation. If such a misprint were found, it might
quite naturally be attributed to carelessness. Valarian Flavigny, who
had many controversies on his hand, brought on the most terrible of them
all with Abraham Ecchellensis by a mere dropped letter. In the rebuke
about the mote in thy brother's eye and the beam in thine own, the first
letter in the Latin for eye was carelessly dropped out, and left a word
which may be found occasionally in Martial's Epigrams, but not in books
of purer Latin and purer ideas.[29]

[Footnote 29: A traditional anecdote represents the Rev. William
Thomson, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, as ha