quite safe in a printing-office; and, if
report speak truly, they will set up what is here set down of them,
without noting that it refers to themselves. It is said that this stoic
indifference is a wonderful provision for the preservation of the purity
of literature, and that, were compositors to think with the author under
the "stick," they might make dire havoc.

We are not to suppose, however, that they take less interest in, or are
less observant of, the work of their hands than other workmen. The point
of view, however, from which their observation is taken, is not exactly
the same as that of their co-operator, the author whose writing they set
up, nor is their notification of specialties of a kind which would
always be felt by him as complimentary. The tremendous philippic of
Junius Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age,
is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted
the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The
exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of
the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that
the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight
of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could recall, who,
with a kind of exulting indignation, thought he had discovered a
celebrated brother of the lyre appropriating his ewe lamb in a flagrant
plagiarism. There was at least one man who had the opportunity of being
acquainted with the productions of his unappreciated muse--the printer.
To him, accordingly, he appealed for confirmation of his suspicions,
demanding if he did not see in the two productions a similarity that in
some places even approached identity. The referee turned over page after
page with the scrupulous attention of one whose acuteness is on trial.
After due deliberation he admitted that there was a very striking
similarity, only it seemed to him that the other's brevier was a shade
thinner in the hair-stroke than his own, and the small caps. would go a
thought more to the pound; while as to the semicolons and marks of
interrogation, they looked as if they came out of a different font
altogether.

It is pleasant to be remembered for something, and the present author
has the assurance that these pages will be imprinted on the memory of
the "chapel" by the decorated capitals and Gothic devices with which a
better taste than his own has strewed t