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 up 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 p 131new 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 Athenum, 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 p 132it 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 curios 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 p 133was `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 `_in_surrection’?