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Notes
Undoubtedly, as Professor Hazen assures me, this is now the consensus; but I have yet to find it acknowledged in print except as a passing note in Dr. R. W. Chapman's recent edition of Johnson's Letters (1952), II, 12, n.4. In an admirable study of Chapman's earlier speculations on these variants (New Colophon, I [1948], 179-180) Mr. H. W. Liebert moves very close to the definitions I would propose, dismisses the "second" of "three impressions" as a mixed copy, but leaves undecided the facts concerning the only later "impression" or edition of 1775. This, I am quite sure, was not corrected at press; and any exemplar which so appears may also appear, from its press figures, to be a mixed copy. In original condition the second invariably contains an errata sheet with the first 6 of the 11 errors listed in the first edition, and with the remaining 5 corrected in the text.
Reproduced through the courtesy of Mr. R. A. Austen-Leigh, Chairman of Spottiswoode & Ballantyne, Ltd.
To Mrs. Donald F. Hyde I am especially indebted for an account of the six copies in the magnificent Hyde collection, and to Mr. John Cook Wyllie for his file of research on the headlines of both editions and on the series of offsets in the University of Virginia copy. Without their advice this study could not have begun; without their insistence it would not have been finished.
See Morning Chronicle, Daily Advertiser and other papers of this date. Preliminary announcements citing this as the day of publication appear in various papers beginning January 11; and repeated notices occur thereafter through January 21. After this there are scattered references, probably to remainders of the second edition, in the Morning Post for February 9, the Public Advertiser for February 13, and the Morning Post, again, as late as June 1.
See the account of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in Miss Norton's bibliography (1940), pp. 36-45; and, for a less successful venture, my note on Fielding's Amelia in PBSA, XLVII (1953), 72-75.
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