University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
MISPRINTS.

OF all literary blunders misprints are the most numerous, and no one who is conversant with the inside of a printing-office will be surprised at this; in fact, he is more likely to be struck with the freedom from error of the innumerable productions issued from the press than to be surprised at the blunders which he may come across. The possibilities of error are endless, and a frequent cause is to be found in the final correction, when a line may easily get transposed. On this account many authors will prefer to leave a trivial error, such as a wrong stop, in a final revise rather than risk the possibilities of blundering caused by the unlocking of the type. Of course a large number of misprints are far from amusing, while a sense of fun will sometimes be

obtained by a trifling transposition of letters. Authors must be on the alert for misprints, although ordinary misspellings should not be left for them by the printer's reader; but they are usually too intent on the structure of their own sentences to notice these misprints. The curious point is that a misprint which has passed through proof and revise unnoticed by reader and author will often be detected immediately the perfected book is placed in the author's hands. The blunder which has hitherto remained hidden appears to start out from the page, to the author's great disgust. One reason why misprints are overlooked is that every word is a sort of pictorial object to the eye. We do not spell the word, but we guess what it is by the first and last letters and its length, so that a wrong letter in the body of the word is easily overlooked.

It is an important help to the editor of a corrupt text to know what misprints are the most probable, and for this purpose the late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps printed for private circulation A Dictionary of Misprints, found in printed books of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, compiled for the use of verbal critics and especially for those who are engaged in editing the works of Shakespeare and our other early Dramatists (1887). In the note at the end of this book Mr. Phillipps writes: «The readiest access to those evidences will be found in the old errata, and it will be seen, on an examination of the latter, that misprints are abundant in final and initial letters, in omissions, in numerals, and in verbal transpositions; but unquestionably the most frequent in pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. When we come to words outside the four latter, there is a large proportion of examples that are either of rare occurrence or unique. Some of the blunders that are recorded are sufficiently grotesque: e.g., Ile starte thence poore for Ile starve their poore,—he formaketh what for the fire maketh hot. It must, indeed, be confessed that the conjectural emendator, if he dispenses with the quasi-authority of contemporary precedents, has an all but unlimited range for the exercise of his ingenuity, the unsettled spellings of our ancestors rendering almost any emendation, however extravagant, a typographical possibility. A large number of their misprints could only have been perpetrated in the midst of the old orthographies. Under no other conditions could ice have been converted into ye, air into time, home into honey, attain into at any, sun into sinner, stone into story, deem into deny, dire into dry, the old spellings of the italicised words being respectively, yce, yee, ayre, tyme, home, honie, attaine, att anie, sunne, sinner, stone, storie, deeme, denie, dire, drie. The form of the long s should also be sometimes taken into consideration, for it could only have been owing to its use that such a word as some could have been misprinted four, niece for wife, prefer for preserve, find for fifth, the variant old spellings being foure, neese, preferre.»

Among the instances of misprints given in this Dictionary may be noticed the following: actions for axioms, agreement for argument, all-eyes for allies, aloud for allowed, banish'd for ravish'd, cancel for cantel, candle for caudle, culsedness

for ourselves, eye-sores for oysters, felicity for facility, Hector for nectar, intending for indenting, John for Jehu, Judges for Indies, scene for seene, sixteen for sexton, and for sixty-one, tops for toy, Venus for Venice.

In connection with this work may be mentioned the late Mr. W. Blades's Shakspere and Typography, being an attempt to show Shakspere's personal connection with, and technical knowledge of the Art of Printing, also Remarks upon some common typographical errors with especial reference to the text of Shakspere (1872), a small work of very great interest and value. Mr. Blades writes: «Now these typographical blunders will, in the majority of cases, be found to fall into one of three classes, viz.:—

«I. Errors of the Ear.—Every compositor when at work reads over a few words of his copy, and retains them in his mind until his fingers have picked

up the various types belonging to them. While the memory is thus repeating to itself a phrase, it is by no means unnatural, nor in practice is it uncommon, for some word or words to become unwittingly supplanted in the mind by others which are similar in sound. It was simply a mental transposition of syllables that made the actor exclaim,—

instead of

And, by a slight confusion of sound, the word mistake might appear in type as must take:—

Again, idle votarist would easily become idol votarist—

and long delays become transformed to longer days—

From the time of Gutenberg until now this similarity of sound has been a fruitful source of error among printers.

«II. Errors of the Eye.—The eye often misleads the hand of the compositor, especially if he be at work upon a crabbed manuscript or worn-out reprint. Take out a dot, and This time goes manly becomes

So a clogged letter turns What beast was't then? into What boast was't then?—

Macbeth, i.

Examples might be indefinitely multiplied from many an old book, so I will quote but one more instance. The word preserve spelt with a long s might without much carelessness be misread preferre (I Henry VI., iii. 2), and thus entirely alter the sense.

«III. Errors from a `foul case.'—This class of errors is of an entirely different

kind from the two former. They came from within the man, and were from the brain; this is from without, mechanical in its origin as well as in its commission. As many readers may never have seen the inside of a printing office, the following short explanation may be found useful: A `case' is a shallow wooden drawer, divided into numerous square receptacles called `boxes,' and into each box is put one sort of letter only, say all a's, or b's, or c's. The compositor works with two of these cases slanting up in front of him, and when, from a shake, a slip, or any other accident, the letters become misplaced the result is technically known as `a foul case.' A further result is, that the fingers of the workman, although going to the proper box, will often pick up a wrong letter, he being entirely unconscious the while of the fact.

«Now, if we can discover any law which governs this abnormal position of the types —if, for instance, we can predicate that the letter o, when away from its own, will be more frequently found in the box appropriated to letter a than any other; that b

has a general tendency to visit the l box, and l the v box; and that d, if away from home, will be almost certainly found among the n's; if we can show this, we shall then lay a good foundation for the re-examination of many corrupt or disputed readings in the text of Shakspere, some of which may receive fresh life from such a treatment.

«To start with, let us obtain a definite idea of the arrangement of the types in both `upper' and `lower' case in the time of Shakspere—a time when long s's, with the logotypes ct, ff, fi, ffi, ffl, sb, sh, si, sl, ss, ssi, ssl, and others, were in daily use.»

Mr. Blades then refers to Moxon's Mechanical Exercises, 1683, which contains a representation of the compositors' cases in the seventeenth century, which may be presumed to be the same in form as those used in Shakespeare's day. Various alterations have been made in the arrangement of the cases, with the object of placing the letters more conveniently. The present form is shown on pp. 110, 111.

Mr. Blades proceeds: «The chief cause of a `foul' case was the same in Shakspere's time as now; and no one interested in the subject should omit visiting a printing office, where he could personally inspect the operation. Suppose a compositor at work `distributing'; the upper and lower cases, one above the other, slant at a considerable angle towards him, and as the types fall quickly from his fingers they form conical heaps in their respective boxes, spreading out in a manner very similar to the sand in the lower half of an hour-glass. Now, if the compositor allows his case to become too full, the topmost letters in each box will certainly slide down into the box below, and occasionally, though rarely, into one of the side boxes. When such letters escape notice, they necessarily cause erroneous spelling, and sometimes entirely change the whole meaning of a sentence. But now comes the important question: Are errors of this kind ever discovered, and especially do they occur in Shakspere? Doubtless they do, but to what extent a long and careful examination alone can

UPPER CASE

[Description: Greyscale image scanned in black & white photo at 200 dpi of the Upper case table.]

LOWER CASE

[Description: Greyscale image scanned in black & white photo at 200 dpi of the Lower case table.]

show. As examples merely, and to show the possible change in sense made by a single wrong letter, I will quote one or two instances:— The word forced should be read farced, the letter o having evidently dropped down into a box. The enemy's ranks were not forced with Macbeth's followers, but farced or filled up. In Murrell's Cookery, 1632, this identical word is used several times; we there see that a farced leg of mutton was when the meat was all taken out of the skin, mixed with herbs, etc., and then the skin filled up again. So all the copies, but `to book' is surely a modern commercial phrase, and the Herald here asked leave simply to `look,' or to examine, the dead for the purpose of giving honourable burial to their men of rank. In the same sense Sir W. Lucie, in the First Part of Henry VI., says:— We cannot imagine an officer with pen, inkhorn, and paper, at a period when few could write, `booking' the dead. We may, I think, take it for granted that here the letter b had fallen over into the l box.»

Another point to bear in mind is the existence of such logotypes as fi, si, etc., so that, as Mr. Blades says, «the change of light into sight must not be considered as a question of a single letter—of s in the l box,» because the box containing si is far away from the l box, and their contents could not well get mixed.

To these instances given by Mr. Blades may be added a very interesting correction suggested to the author some years ago by a Shakespearian student. When Isabella visits her brother in prison, the

cowardly Claudio breaks forth in complaint, and paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the damned:— We have here, in the expression «delighted spirit,» a difficulty which none of the commentators have as yet been able to explain. Warburton said that the adjective meant «accustomed to ease and delights,» but this was not a very successful guess, although Steevens adopted it. Sir Thomas Hanmer altered delighted to dilated, and Dr. Johnson mentions two suggested emendations, one being benighted and the other delinquent. None of these suggestions can be corroborated by a reference to the plans of the printers' cases, but it will be seen that the one now proposed is much strengthened by the position of the boxes in those plans. The suggested word is deleted, which accurately describes the spirits as destroyed, or blotted out of existence. The word is common in the printing office, and it was often used in literature.

If we think only of the recognised spelling of the word delighted we shall find that there are three letters to alter, but if we take the older spelling, delited, the change is very easily made, for it will be noticed that the letters in the i box might easily tumble over into the e box.

There is a very curious description of hell in Bede's Ecclesiastical History, where the author speaks of «deformed spirits» who leap from excess of heat to cutting cold, and it is not improbable that Shakespeare may have had this passage in his

mind when he put these words into the mouth of Claudio.10

It is taken for granted that the compositor is not likely to put his hand into the wrong box, so that if a wrong letter is used, it must have fallen out of its place.

An important class of misprints owes its origin to this misplacement; but, as noticed by Mr. Blades, there are other classes, such as misspellings caused by the compositor's ignorance or misunderstanding. We must remember that the printer has to work fast, and if he does not recognise a word he is very likely to turn it into something he does understand. Thus the title of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions was curiously changed in an advertisement, and the Calamites, a species of fossil plants of the coal measures, with but slight change appeared as «The True Fructification of Calamities.» This is a blunder pretty sure to be made, and within a few days of writing this, the author has seen a reference

to «Notes on some Pennsylvanian Calamities.» As an instance of less excusable ignorance, we shall often find the word gauge printed as guage.

One of the slightest of misprints was the cause of an odd query in the second series of Notes and Queries, which, by the way, has never yet been answered. In John Hall's Horæ Vacivæ (1646) there is this passage, alluding to the table game called tick-tack. The author wrote: «Tick tack sets a man's intentions on their guard. Errors in this and war can be but once amended»; but the printer joined the two words «and war» into one, and this puzzled the correspondent of the Notes and Queries (v. 272). He asked: «Who can quote another passage from any author containing this word? I have hunted after it in many dictionaries without avail. It means, I suppose, antagonism or contest, and resembles in form many Anglo-Saxon words which never found their way into English proper.» The blunder was not discovered, and another correspondent wrote: «The word andwar would surely modernise into handwar.

Is not andirons (handirons) a parallel word of the same genus?' In the General Index we find «Andwar, an old English word.» So much for the long life of a very small blunder.

A very similar blunder to this of «andwar» occurs in Select Remains of the learned John Ray with his Life by the late William Derham, which was published in 1760 with a dedication to the Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, signed by George Scott. In Derham's Life of Ray a list of books read by Ray in 1667 is printed from a letter to Dr. Lister, and one of these is printed «The Business about great Rakes.» Mr. Scott must have been puzzled with this title; but he was evidently a man not to be daunted by a difficulty, for he added a note to this effect: «They are now come into general use among the farmers, and are called drag rakes.» Who would suspect after this that the title is merely a misprint, and that the pamphlet refers to the proceedings of Valentine Greatrakes, the famous stroker, who claimed equal power

with the kings and queens of England in curing the king's evil? This blunder will be found uncorrected in Dr. Lankester's Memorials of John Ray, published by the Ray Society in 1846, and does not seem to have been suspected until the Rev. Richard Hooper called attention to it a short time ago in Notes and Queries.11

An amusing instance of the invention of a new word was afforded when the printer produced the words «a noticeable fact in thisms» instead of «this MS.»

The misplacement of a stop, or the transposition of a letter, or the dropping out of one, will make sad havoc of the sense of a passage, as when we read of the immoral works of Milton. It was, however, a very complimentary misprint by which it was made to appear that a certain town had a remarkably high rate of morality. In the address to Dr. Watts by J. Standen prefixed to that author's Horæ Lyricæ (Leeds, 1788) this same misprint occurs, to the serious confusion of Mr. Standen's meaning,—

On another page of this same book Watts' «daring flight» is transposed to darling flight.

In Miss Yonge's Dynevor Terrace a portion of one word was joined on to another with the awkward result that a young lady is described «without stretched arms.»

The odd results of the misplacement of stops must be familiar to most readers; but it is not often that they are so serious as in the following instances. William Sharp, the celebrated line engraver, believed in the Divine mission of the madman Richard Brothers, and engraved a portrait of that worthy with the following inscription beneath it: «Fully believing this to be the man appointed by God, I engrave his likeness.—W. SHARP.» The writing engraver by mistake put the comma after the word appointed, and omitted it at the latter part of the sentence, thus giving a ludicrous effect to the whole inscription. Many impressions were struck off before the

mistake was discovered and rectified. The question of an apostrophe was the ground of a civil action a few years ago in Switzerland; and although the anecdote refers to a manuscript, and not to a printed document, it is inserted here because it illustrates the subject. A gentleman left a will which ended thus: «Et pour témoigner à mes neveux Charles et Henri de M— toute mon affection je lègue à chacun d'eux cent mille francs.» The paper upon which the will was written was folded up before the ink was dry, and therefore many of the letters were blotted. The legatees asserted that the apostrophe was a blot, and therefore claimed two instead of one hundred thousand francs each.

Several misprints are always recurring, such as the mixture of the words Topography and Typography, and Biography with Bibliography. In the prospectus of an edition of the Waverley Novels we read: «The aim of the publishers has been to make it pre-eminent, by beauty of topography and illustration, as an édition de luxe.»

Andrew Marvell published a book which

he entitled The Rehearsal Transprosed; but it is seldom that a printer can be induced to print the title otherwise than as The Rehearsal Transposed.

It must be conceded in favour of printers that some authors do write an execrable hand. One sometimes receives a letter which requires about three readings before it can be understood. At the first time of reading the meaning is scarcely intelligible, at the second time some faint glimpse of the writer's object in writing is obtained, and at the third time the main point of the letter is deciphered. Such men may be deemed to be the plague of printers. A friend of Beloe «the Sexagenarian» was remonstrated with by a printer for being the cause of a large amount of swearing in his office. «Sir,» exclaimed Mr. A., «the moment `copy' from you is divided among the compositors, volley succeeds volley as rapidly and as loudly as in one of Lord Nelson's victories.»

There is a popular notion among authors that it is not wise to write a clear hand; and Ménage was one of the first to express it. He wrote: «If you desire that no mistakes

shall appear in the works which you publish, never send well-written copy to the printer, for in that case the manuscript is given to young apprentices, who make a thousand errors; while, on the other hand, that which is difficult to read is dealt with by the master-printers.» It is also related that the late eminent Arabic scholar, Mr. E. W. Lane, who wrote a particularly good hand, asked his printer how it was that there were always so many errors in his proofs. He was answered that such clear writing was always given to the boys, as experienced compositors could not be spared for it. The late Dean Hook held to this opinion, for when he was asked to allow a sermon to be copied out neatly for the press, he answered that if it were to be printed he would prefer to write it out himself as badly as he could. This practice, if it ever existed, we are told by experienced printers does not exist now.

It must, one would think, have been the badness of the «copy» that induced the compositors to turn «the nature and theory of the Greek verb» into the native theology of the Greek verb; «the conservation

of energy» into the conversation of energy; and the «Forest Conservancy Branch» into the Forest Conservatory Branch.

Some printers go out of their way to make blunders when they are unable to understand their «copy.» Thus, in the Times, some years ago, among the contributors to the Garibaldi Fund was a bookbinder who gave five shillings. The next down in the list was one «A. Lega Fletcher,» a name which was printed as A Ledger stitcher.

Some very extraordinary blunders have been made by the ignorant misreading of an author's contractions. It is said that in a certain paper which was sent to be printed the words Indian Government were contracted as Indian Govt. This one compositor set up throughout his turn as Indian goat. A writer in one of the Reviews wrote the words «J. C. first invaded Britain,» and a worthy compositor, who made it his business to fill up all the abbreviations, printed this as Jesus Christ instead of Julius Cæsar.

Here it may be remarked that some of

the most extraordinary misprints never get farther than the printing office or the study; but although they may have been discovered by the reader or the author, they were made nevertheless.

Sometimes the fun of a misprint consists in its elaborateness and completeness, and sometimes in its simplicity (perhaps only the change of a letter). Of the first class the transformation of Shirley's well-known lines is a good example:—

is scarcely recognisable as The statement that «men should work and play Loo,» obtained from «men should work and play too,» illustrates the second class.

The version of Pope which was quoted by a correspondent of the Times about a year ago is very charming:—

The reporter or printer who mistook the Oxford professor's allusion to the Eumenides, and quoted him as speaking of «those terrible old Greek goddesses—the Humanities,» was still more elaborate in his joke.

Horace Greeley is well known to have been an exceedingly bad writer; but when he quoted the well-known line (which is said to be equal to a florin, because there are four tizzies in it)—

one might have expected the compositor to recognise the quotation, instead of printing the astonishing calculation— This is as bad as the blunder of the printer of the Hampshire paper who is said to have announced that Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were engaged shooting peasants at Drayton Manor.

It is perhaps scarcely fair to quote too many blunders from newspapers, which must often be hurriedly compiled, but naturally they furnish the richest crop.

The point of a leader in an American paper was lost by a misprint, which reads as follows: «We do battle without shot or charge for the cause of the right.» This would be a very ineffectual battle, and the proper words were without stint or change.

A writer on Holland in one of the magazines quoted Samuel Butler's well-known lines—

It is of course easy to invent misprints, and therefore one feels a little doubtful sometimes with respect to those which are quoted without chapter and verse.

One of the most remarkable blunders ever made in a newspaper was connected with the burial of the well-known literary man, John Payne Collier. In the Standard of Sept. 21st, 1883, it was reported that «the remains of the late Mr. John Payne Collier were interred yesterday

in Bray Churchyard, near Maidenhead, in the presence of a large number of spectators.» The paragraph maker of the Eastern Daily Press had never heard of Payne Collier, so he thought the last name should be printed with a small C, and wanting a heading for his paragraph he invented one straight off, and this is what appeared in that paper:—

«The Bray Colliery Disaster. The remains of the late John Payne, collier, were interred yesterday afternoon in the Bray Churchyard, in the presence of a large number of friends and spectators.»

This was a brilliant stroke of imagination, for who would expect to find a colliery near Maidenhead?

Mr. Sala, writing to Notes and Queries (Third Series, i. 365), says: «Altogether I have long since arrived at the conclusion that there are more `devils' in a printing office than are dreamt of in our philosophy— the blunder fiends to wit—ever busy in peppering the `formes' with errors which defy the minutest revisions of reader, author, sub-editor, and editor.» Mr. Sala gives an instance which occurred

to himself. He wrote that Dr. Livingstone wore a cap with a tarnished gold lace band; but the printer altered the word tarnished into famished, to the serious confusion of the passage.

Some of the most amusing blunders occur by the change of a single letter. Thus, in an account of the danger to an express train by a cow getting on the line in front, the reporter was made to say that as the safest course under the circumstances the engine driver «put on full steam, dashed up against the cow, and literally cut it into calves.» A short time ago an account was given in an address of the early struggles of an eminent portrait painter, and the statement appeared in print that, working at the easel from eight o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night, the artist «only lay down on the hearthrug for rest and refreshment between the visits of his sisters.» This is not so bad, however, as the report that «a bride was accompanied to the altar by tight bridesmaids.» A very odd blunder occurred in the World of Oct. 6th, 1886, one which was so odd that the editor

thought it worthy of notice by himself in a subsequent number. The paragraph in which the misprint occurred related to the filling up of the vicarage of St. Mary's, Islington, which it was thought had been unduly delayed. The trustees in whose gift the living is were informed that if they had a difficulty in finding a clergyman of the proper complexion of low churchism there were still Venns in Kent. Here the natural confusion of the letters u and n came into play, and as the paragraph was printed it appeared that a Venus of Kent was recommended for the vicarage of St. Mary's.

The compositor who set up the account of a public welcome to a famous orator must have been fresh from the study of Porson's Catechism of the Swinish Multitude when he set yp the damaging statement that «the crowd rent the air with their snouts.»

Sometimes the blunder consists not in the misprint of a letter, but in a mere transposition, as when an eminent herald and antiquary was dubbed Rogue Croix instead of Rouge Croix. Sometimes a

new but appropriate word results by the thrusting into a recognised word of a redundant letter, as when a man died from eating too much goose the verdict was said to have been «death from stuffocation.»

Many of these blunders, although amusing to the public, cannot have been altogether agreeable to the subjects of them. Mr. Justice Wightman could not have been pleased to see himself described as Mr. Justice Nightman; and the right reverend prelate who was stated «to be highly pleased with some ecclesiastical iniquities shown to him» must have been considerably scandalised.

Professor Hales is very much of the opinion of Mr. Sala respecting the labours of the «blunder fiend,» and he sent an amusing letter to the Athenæum, in which he pointed out a curious misprint in one of his own books. As the contents of the letter is very much to the point, readers will perhaps not object to seeing it transferred in its entirety to these pages:—

«The humour of compositors is apt to be imperfectly appreciated by authors, because

it rather interferes with what the author wishes to say, although it may often say something better. But there is no reason why the general reader should not thoroughly enjoy it. Certainly it ought to be more generously recognised than it is. So many persons at present think of it as merely accidental and fortuitous, as if there was no mind in it, as if all the excellent things loosely described as errata, all the curiosæ felicitates of the setter-up of texts, were casual blunders. Such a view reminds one of the way in which the last-century critics used to speak of Shakspere —the critics who give him no credit for design or selection, but thought that somehow or other he stumbled into greatness. However, I propose now not to attempt the defence, or, what might be worth the effort, the analysis of this species of Wit, but only to give what seemed an admirable instance of it.

«In a note to the word limboes in the Clarendon Press edition of Milton's Areopagitica, I quoted from Nares's Glossary a list of the various limbi believed in by the `old schoolmen,' and No. 2

was `a limbus patrum where the fathers of the Church, saints, and martyrs, awaited the general resurrection.' Will any one say it was not a stroke of genius in some printing-office humourist to alter the last word into `insurrection'?

«Like all good wit, this change is so suggestive. It raises up a cloud of new ideas, and reduces the hearer to a delightful confusion. How strangely it revises all our popular notions! If even beyond the grave the great problems that keep men here restless and murmuring are not solved! If even there the rebellious spirit is not quieted! Nay, if those whom we think of as having won peace for themselves in this world, do in that join the malcontents, and are each one biding their time— w`Σ την ΔιοΣ τυραννιδ εκπσων βια.

«May we not conceive this bold jester, if haply he were a stonemason, chiselling on some tombstone `Insurgam'?»

Allusion has already been made to the persistency of misprints and the difficulty of curing them; but one of the most

curious instances of this may be found in a line of Byron's beautiful apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold (Canto iv.). The one hundred and eighty-second stanza is usually printed:— Not many years ago a critic, asking himself the question when the waters wasted these countries, began to suspect a misprint, and on consulting the manuscript, it was found that he was right. The blunder, which had escaped Byron's own eyes, was corrected, and the third line was printed as originally written:—

The carelessness of printers seems to hare culminated in their production of the Scriptures. The old editions of the Bible swarm with blunders, and some of them were supposed to have been made intentionally. It was said that the printer

Field received £ 1500 from the Independents as a bribe to corrupt a text which might sanction their practice of lay-ordination, and in Acts vi. 3 the word ye is substituted for we in several of his editions of the Bible. The verse reads: «Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among ye seven men of honesr report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom ye may appoint over this business.» To such forgeries Butler refers in the lines:—

Hudibras, Part III., Canto 2.

Dr. Grey, in his notes on this passage, brings forward the charge against Field, and quotes Wotton's Visitation Sermon (1706) in support of it. He also quotes from Cowley's Puritan and Papist as to the practice of corrupting texts:—

Pope Sixtus the Fifth's Vulgate so swarmed with errors that paper had to

be pasted over some of the erroneous passages, and the public naturally laughed at the bull prefixed to the first volume which excommunicated any printer who altered the text. This was all the more annoying to the Pope, as he had intended the edition to be specially free from errors, and to attain that end had seen all the proofs himself. Some years ago a copy of this book was sold in France for 1210 francs.

The King's Printers, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, in the reign of Charles I. were not excommunicated, but, what perhaps they liked less, were fined £300 by the Court of High Commission for leaving the not out of the seventh commandment in an edition of the Bible printed in 1631. Although this story has been frequently quoted it has been disbelieved, and the great bibliographer of Bibles, the late Mr. George Offer, asserted that he and his father searched diligently for it, and could not find it. Now, six copies are known to exist. The late Mr. Henry Stevens gives a most interesting account of the first discovery of the book

in his Recollections of Mr. James Lennox. He writes:—

«Mr. Lennox was so strict an observer of the Sabbath that I never knew of his writing a business letter on Sunday but once. In 1855, while he was staying at Hotel Meurice in Paris, there occurred to me the opportunity one Saturday afternoon, June 16th, of identifying the long lost octavo Bible of 1631 with the negative omitted in the seventh commandment, and purchasing it for fifty guineas. No other copy was then known, and the possessor required an immediate answer. However, I raised some points of inquiry, and obtained permission to hold the little sinner and give the answer on Monday. By that evening's post I wrote to Mr. Lennox, and pressed for an immediate reply, suggesting that this prodigal though he returned on Sunday should be bound. Monday brought a letter `to buy it,' very short, but tender as a fatted calf. On June 21st I exhibited it at a full meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London, at the same time nicknaming it The Wicked Bible, a name that stuck to

it ever since, though six copies are now known. . . . Lord Macaulay was present at the meeting, but did not at first credit the genuineness of the typographical error. Lord Stanhope, however, on borrowing the volume, convinced him that it was the true wicked error.»

Curiously enough, when Mr. Stevens took the Bible home on Saturday night he overhauled his pile of octavo Bibles, and found an imperfect duplicate of the supposed unique «wicked» Bible. When the owner came for his book on Monday morning he was shown the duplicate, and agreed, as his copy was not unique, to take £25 for it. The imperfect copy was sold to the British Museum for eighteen guineas, and Mr. Winter Jones was actually so fortunate as to obtain subsequently the missing twenty-three leaves. A third copy came into the hands of Mr. Francis Fry, of Bristol, who sold it to Dr. Bandinel for the Bodleian Library. A fourth copy is in the Euing Library, at Glasgow; a fifth fell into the hands of Mr. Henry J. Atkinson, of Gunnersbury,in 1883; and

a sixth copy was picked up in Ireland by a gentleman of Coventry In 1884.

In a Bible of 1634 the first verse of the 14th Psalm is printed as «The fool hath said in his heart there is God»; and in another Bible of 1653 worldly takes the place of godly, and reads, «In order that all the world should esteem the means of arriving at worldly riches.»

If Field was not a knave, as hinted above, he was singularly unfortunate in his blunders; for in another of his Bibles he also omitted the negative in an important passage, and printed I Corinthians vi. 9 as, «Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?»

It is recorded that a printer's widow in Germany once tampered with the purity of the text of a Bible printed in her house, for which crime she was burned to death. She arose in the night, when all the workmen were in bed, and going to the «forme» entirely changed the meaning of a text which particularly offended her. The text was Gen. iii. 16 («Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee»).

This story does not rest on a very firm foundation, and as the recorder does not mention the date of the occurrence, it must be taken by the reader for what it is worth. The following incident, vouched for by a well-known author, is, however, very similar. James Silk Buckingham relates the following curious anecdote in his Autobiography:—

«While working at the Clarendon Printing Office a story was current among the men, and generally believed to be authentic, to the following effect. Some of the gay young students of the University, who loved a practical joke, had made themselves sufficiently familiar with the manner in which the types are fixed in certain formes and laid on the press, and with the mode of opening such formes for correction when required; and when the sheet containing the Marriage Service was about to be worked off, as finally corrected, they unlocked the forme, took out a single letter v, and substituted in its place the letter k, thus converting the word live into like. The result was that, when the sheets were printed, that part

of the service which rendered the bond irrevocable, was so changed as to make it easily dissolved—as the altered passage now read as follows:—The minister asking the bridegroom, `Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall like?' To which the man shall answer, `I will.' The same change was made in the question put to the bride.»

If the culprits who left out a word deserved to be heavily mulcted in damages, it is difficult to calculate the liability of those who left out whole verses. When Archbishop Ussher was hastening to preach at Paul's Cross, he went into a shop to purchase a Bible, and on turning over the pages for his text found it was omitted.

Andrew Anderson, a careless, faulty printer in Edinburgh, obtained a monopoly as king's printer, which was exercised on

his death in 1679 by his widow. The productions of her press became worse and worse, and her Bibles were a standing disgrace to the country. Robert Chambers, in his Domestic Annals of Scotland, quotes the following specimen from an edition of 1705: «Whyshouldit-bethougtathingincredi ble wͭ you, yͭ God should raise the dead?» Even this miserable blundering could not have been much worse than the Pearl Bible with six thousand errata mentioned by Isaac Disraeli.

The first edition of the English Scriptures printed in Ireland was published at Belfast in 1716, and is notorious for an error in Isaiah. Sin no more is printed Sin on more. In the following year was published at Oxford the well-known Vinegar Bible, which takes its name from a blunder in the running title of the twentieth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, where it reads «The parable of the vinegar,» instead of «The parable of the vineyard.» In a Cambridge Prayer Book of 1778 the thirtieth verse of Psalm cv. is travestied as follows: «Their land brought

forth frogs, yea seven in their king's chambers.» An Oxford Bible of 1792 names St. Philip instead of St. Peter as the disciple who should deny Christ (Luke xxii. 34); and in an Oxford New Testament of 1864 we read, «Rejoice, and be exceeding clad» (Matt. v. 12). To be impartial, however, it is necessary to mention a Cambridge Bible of 1831, where Psalm cxix. 93 appears as «I will never forgive thy precepts.» A Bible printed at Edinburgh in 1823 contains a curious misprint caused by a likeness in pronunciation of two words, Esther being printed for Easter, «Intending after Esther to bring him forth to the people» (Acts xii. 4). A misprint of the old hundredth Psalm (do well for do dwell) in the Prayer Book might perhaps be considered as an improvement,—

Errors are specially frequent in figures, often caused by the way in which the characters are cut. The aim of the founder seems to be to make them as much alike as possible, so that it frequently

requires a keen eye to discover the difference between a 3 and a 5. In one of Chernac's Mathematical Tables a line fell out before going to press, and instead of being replaced at the bottom of the page it was put in at the top, thus causing twenty-six errors. Besides these, however, only ten errors have been found in the whole work of 1020 pages, all full of figures. Vieta's Canon Mathematicus (1579) is of great rarity, from the author being discontented with the misprints that had escaped his notice, and on that account withdrawing or repurchasing all the copies he could meet with. Some mathematicians, to ensure accuracy, have made their calculations with the types in their own hands. In the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography there is a misprint in a date which confuses a whole article. William Ayrton, musical critic, is said to have been born in London about 1781, but curiously enough his father is reported to have been born three years afterwards (1784); and still more odd, that father was appointed gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1764, twenty years before he is stated to have been born.

In connection with figures may be mentioned the terrible confusion which is caused by the simple dropping out of a decimal point. Thus a passage in which 6.36 is referred to naturally becomes utter nonsense when 636 is printed instead. Such a misprint is as bad as the blunder of the French compositor, who, having to set up a passage referring to Captain Cook, turned de Cook into de 600 kilos. An amusing blunder was quoted a few years ago from a German paper where the writer, referring to Prince Bismarck's endeavours to keep on good terms with all the Powers, was made to say, «Prince Bismarck is trying to keep up honest and straightforward relations with all the girls.» This blunder was caused by the substitution of the word Mädchen (girls) for Mächten (powers).

The French have always been interested in misprints, and they have registered a considerable number. One of the happiest is that one which was caused by Malherbe's bad writing, and induced him to

adopt the misprint in his verse in place of that which he had originally written. The lines, written on a daughter of Du Perrier named Rosette, now stand thus:—

Malherbe had written,—

but forgetting «to cross his tees» the compositor made the fortunate blunder of printing rose elle, which so pleased the author that he let it stand, and modified the following lines in accordance with the printer's improvement.

Rabelais nearly got into trouble by a blunder of his printer, who in several places set up asne for âme. A council met at the Sorbonne to consider the case against him, and the doctors formally denounced Rabelais to Francis I., and requested permission to prosecute him for heresy; but the king after consideration refused to give the permission.

Rabelais then laughed at his accusers for founding a charge of heresy against him on a printer's blunder, but there were strong suspicions that the misprints were intentional.

These misprints are styled by the French coquilles, a word whose derivation M. Boutney, author of Dictionnaire de l'Argot des Typographes, is unable to explain after twenty years' search. A number of Longman's Magazine contains an article on these coquilles, in which very many amusing blunders are quoted. One of these gave rise to a pun which is so excellent that it is impossible to resist the temptation of transferring the anecdote from those pages to these:—

«In the Rue Richelieu there is a statue of Corneille holding a roll in his hand, on which are inscribed the titles of his principal works. The task of incising these names it appears had been given to an illiterate young apprentice, who thought proper to spell avare with two r's. A wit, observing this, remarked pleasantly, Tiens, voilà an avare qui a un air misanthrope (un r mis en trop).»

In a newspaper account of Mr. Gladstone's religious views the word Anglican is travestied as Afghan, with the following curious result: «There is no form of faith in existence more effectually tenacious than the Afghan form, which asserts the full catholicity of that branch church whose charter is the English Church Prayer Book.»

In the diary of John Hunter, of Craigcrook, it is recorded that at one of the meetings between the diarist, Leigh Hunt, and Carlyle, «Hunt gave us some capital specimens of absurd errors of the press committed by printers from his copy. One very good one occurs in a paper, where he had said, `he had a liking for coffee because it always reminded him of the Arabian Nights,' though not mentioned there, adding, `as smoking does for the same reason.' This was converted into the following oracular words: `As sucking does for the snow season'! He could not find it in his heart to correct this, and thus it stands as a theme for the profound speculations of the commentators.»

A very slight misprint will make a great difference; sometimes an unintelliglble word is produced, but sometimes the mere transposition of a letter will make a word exactly opposite in its meaning to the original, as unite for untie. In Jeremy Taylor's XXV. Sermons preached at Golden Grove: Being for the Winter half-year (London, 1653), p. 247, we read, «It may help to unite the charm,» whereas the author wished to say «untie.»

The title of Cobbett's Horse-hoeing Husbandry was easily turned into Horse-shoeing Husbandry, that of the Holy Grail into Holy Gruel, and Layamon's Brut into Layamon's Brat.

A local paper, reporting the proceedings at the Bath meeting of the British Association, affirmed that an eminent chemist had «not been able to find any fluidity in the Bath waters.» Fluorine was meant. It was also stated that a geologist asserted that «the bones found in the submerged forests of Devonshire were closely representative of the British farmer.» The last word should have been fauna.

The strife of tongs is suggestive of a more serious battle than that of talk only; and the compositor who set up Portia's speech—

and turned the last words into howling Tory, must have been a rabid politician.

The transposition of «He kissed her under the silent stars» into «He kicked her under the cellar stairs» looks rather too good to be true, and it cannot be vouched for; but the title «Microscopic Character of the Virtuous Rocks of Montana» is a genuine misprint for vitreous, as is also «Buddha's perfect uselessness» for «Buddha's perfect sinlessness.» It is rather startling to find a quotation from the Essay on Man introduced by the words «as the Pope says,» or to find the famous painter Old Crome styled an «old Crone.»

A most amusing instance of a misreading may be mentioned here, although it is not a literary blunder. A certain

black cat was named Mephistopheles a name which greatly puzzled the little girl who played with the cat, so she very sensibly set to work to reduce the name to a form which she could understand, and she arrived at «Miss Pack-of-fleas.»

Sometimes a ludicrous blunder may be made by the mere closing up of two words; thus the orator who spoke of our «grand Mother Church» had his remark turned into a joke when it was printed as «grandmother Church.» A still worse blunder was made in an obituary notice of a well-known congressman in an American paper, where the reference to his «gentle, manly spirit» was turned into «gentlemanly spirit.»

Misprints are very irritating to most authors, but some can afford to make fun of the trouble; thus Hood's amusing lines are probably founded upon some blunder that actually occurred:—

Henry Stephens (Estienne), the learned printer, made a joke over a misprint. The word febris was printed with the diphthong œ, so Stephens excused himself by saying in the errata that «le chalcographe a fait une fièvre longue (fœbrem) quoique une fièvre courte (febrem) soit moins dangereux.»

Allusion has already been made in the first chapter to Professor Skeat's ghost

words. Most of these have arisen from misreadings or misprints, and two extraordinary instances may be noted here. The purely modern phrase «look sharp» was supposed to have been used in the time of Chaucer, because «loke schappe» (see that you form, etc.) of the manuscript was printed «loke scharpe.» In the other instance the scribe wrote yn for m, and thus he turned «chek matyde» into «chek yn a tyde.»12

In the Academy for Feb. 25th, 1888, Dr. Skeat explained another discovery of his of the same kind, by which he is able to correct a time-honoured blunder in English literature:— «CAMBRIDGE: Feb. 14, 1888.

«When I explained, in the Academy for January 7 (p. 9), that the word `Herenus ' is simply a mistake for `Herines,' i.e., the furies (such being the Middle-English form of Erinnyes), I did not expect that I should so soon light upon another singular perversion of the same word.

«In Chaucer's Works, ed. 1561, fol. 322, back, there is a miserable poem, of much later date than that of Chaucer's death, entitled `The Remedie of Love.' The twelfth stanza begins thus:

It is clear that `Hermes' is a scribal error for `Herines,' and that the scribe has added `thou' out of his own head, to keep `Hermes' company. The context bears this out; for the author utterly rejects the inspiration of the Muses in the preceding stanza, and proceeds to invoke furies, harpies, and, to use his own expression, `all this lothsome sort.' Many of the lines almost defy scansion, so that no help is to be got from observing the run of the lines. Nevertheless, this fresh instance of the occurrence of `Herines' much assists my argument; all the more so, as it appears in a disguised shape. «WALTER W. SKEAT.» Sometimes a misprint is intentional, as in the following instance. At the beginning of the century the Courrier des Pays Bas was bought by some young men, who changed its politics, but kept on the editor. The motto of the paper was from Horace: and the editor, wishing to let his friends at a distance know that things were not going on quite well between him and his proprietors, printed this motto as,— This was continued for three weeks before it was discovered and corrected by the persons concerned.

Another kind of misprint which we see occasionally is the misplacement of some lines of type. This may easily occur when the formes are being locked, and the result is naturally nonsense that much confuses the reader. Probably the finest instance of this misplacement occurred some years ago in an edition of Men of the Time (1856), where the entry relating to Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, got mixed up with that of Robert Owen, the Socialist,

with the result that the bishop was stated to be «a confirmed sceptic as regards revealed religion, but a believer in Spiritualism.» It was this kind of blunder which suggested the formation of cross-readings, that were once very popular.