quantity of typographical errors exposed in those pages, where they
are least to be expected, and are least excusable, opens up some curious
considerations. It may surely be believed that, between the compositors
who put the types together and the correctors of the press, the printing
of the Bible has generally been executed with more than average care.
Yet the editions of the sacred book have been the great mine of
discovered printers' blunders. The inference from this, however, is not
that blunders abound less in other literature, but that they are not
worth finding there. The issuing of the true reading of the Scripture is
of such momentous consequence, that a mistake is sure of exposure, like
those minute incidents of evidence which come forth when a murder has
been committed, but would never have left their privacy for the
detection of a petty fraud.

The value to literature of a pure Shakespearian text, has inspired the
zeal of the detectives who work on this ground. Some casual detections
have occurred in minor literature,--as, for instance, when Akenside's
description of the Pantheon, which had been printed as "serenely great,"
was restored to "severely great." The reason, however, why such
detections are not common in common books, is the rather humiliating one
that they are not worth making. The specific weight of individual words
is in them of so little influence, that one does as well as another.
Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has
much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to
achieve--as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes
supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which the cunning of his
hand cannot accomplish. Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most
alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the
contrary, sometimes rather improved. I might refer to a signal instance
of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a
poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second
and fourth of each quatrain changed places. This transposition was
pronounced to operate a decided improvement on the spirit and
originality of the piece,--an opinion in which, unfortunately, the
author did not concur; nor could he appreciate the compliment of a
critic, who remarked that the experiment tested the soundness of the
lines, which could find their feet whatever way they were thrown