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 p 101obtained 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 p 102sixteenth 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