University of Virginia Library

Of the many anecdotes related in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides one is of especial interest. 'In the 65th page of the first volume of Sir George Mackenzie,'[1] writes Boswell, 'Doctor Johnson pointed out a paragraph beginning with "Aristotle", and told me there was an error in the text, which he bade me to try to discover. I was lucky enough to hit it at once. As the passage is printed it is said that the Devil answers even in engines. I corrected it to — ever in œnigmas. "Sir," (said he), you are a good critick. This would have been a great thing to do in the text of an ancient authour."'[2]

What, in sum, does one expect of the 'good critick' of texts? What qualities should he possess, and what desiderata are to be sought in him? It is a pity that one of the most lively introductions to the subject at large, although with especial reference to dramatic texts, should remain unpublished.[3] At first sight, to quote a practical instance, it

would not seem to require a Theobald or a Bentley to emend the second line of the following: yet caution here is well rewarded; a glance will show that the OED. recognizes the catachrestic usage of 'beatified'. Apart, however, from diffidence in emendation as a prime requisite, one can hardly postulate definite criteria of the textual critic — one can only appraise his text. What is required is, therefore, not advice but rather a practical, and preferably an as yet untrodden, training ground which embraces if possible both print and manuscript versions of a given passage.[5] One possible example, relating to Roger North's Examen (1740) of White Kennet's Compleat History is lost: the first professes that its manuscript is at Jesus College, Cambridge, but it is no longer there.

The purpose of the present paper is to draw attention to another such source of material, one which has as yet hardly been touched by scholars specializing in the transmission of texts. Though the subject matter is of little interest as literature, it is safe to say that hardly a problem which the editor of a Restoration prose text (other than the dramatic) is likely to encounter does not occur there. An immediate advantage of its perusal is the furnishing of a reliable source-text for the writer on the history of science. Clearly this is no place to revive or discuss the logical-positivist interpretation of such material, but it may be pointed out in passing that many of the problems in its interpretation are not 'scientific' at all, but literary or bibliographical, a point which I have stressed elsewhere.[6] The present purpose is twofold: (I) to consider the relevant manuscripts and printed sources, attempting to assess briefly their relative provenance and value, and (II) to note some variants encountered in the texts as the results of (a) deliberate editorial policy, (b) copyists' errors and printers' literals, and (c) instances where a decision may be made between alternatives.