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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
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