is Holiness carefully superintended every sheet
as it passed through the press; and, to the amazement of the world, the
work remained without a rival--it swarmed with errata! A multitude of
scraps were printed to paste over the erroneous passages, in order to
give the true text. The book makes a whimsical appearance with these
patches; and the heretics exulted in this demonstration of papal
infallibility! The copies were called in, and violent attempts made to
suppress it; a few still remain for the raptures of the biblical
collectors; not long ago the bible of Sixtus V. fetched above sixty
guineas--not too much for a mere book of blunders! The world was highly
amused at the bull of the editorial Pope prefixed to the first volume,
which excommunicates all printers who in reprinting the work should make
any _alteration_ in the text!

In the version of the Epistles of St. Paul into the Ethiopic language,
which proved to be full of errors, the editors allege a good-humoured
reason--"They who printed the work could not read, and we could not
print; they helped us, and we helped them, as the blind helps the
blind."

A printer's widow in Germany, while a new edition of the Bible was
printing at her house, one night took an opportunity of stealing into
the office, to alter that sentence of subjection to her husband,
pronounced upon Eve in Genesis, chap. 3, v. 16. She took out the two
first letters of the word HERR, and substituted NA in their place, thus
altering the sentence from "and he shall be thy LORD" (_Herr_), to "and
he shall be thy FOOL" (_Narr_). It is said her life paid for this
intentional erratum; and that some secreted copies of this edition have
been bought up at enormous prices.

We have an edition of the Bible, known by the name of _The Vinegar
Bible_; from the erratum in the title to the 20th chap. of St. Luke, in
which "Parable of the _Vineyard_," is printed, "Parable of the
_Vinegar_." It was printed in 1717, at the Clarendon press.

We have had another, where "Thou shalt commit adultery" was printed,
omitting the negation; which occasioned the archbishop to lay one of the
heaviest penalties on the Company of Stationers that was ever recorded
in the annals of literary history.[37]

Herbert Croft used to complain of the incorrectness of our English
classics, as reprinted by the booksellers. It is evident some stupid
printer often changes a whole text intentionally. The fine description
by Akenside of t