``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—­

     gr w!s th!n Dio!s turanni’d’ e’kprswn bi’a>.

``May we not conceive this bold jester, if haply he were a stonemason, chiselling on some tombstone `_In_surgam’?’’

Allusion has already been made to the persistency of misprints and the difficulty of curing them; but one of the most p 134curious 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:—­

 ``Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—­
   Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? 
   Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
   And many a tyrant since . . .’’

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:—­

     ``Thy waters wash’d them power while they were free.

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 p 135Field received Pd1500 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:—­

 ``Religion spawn’d a various rout
   Of petulant capricious sects,
   The maggots of corrupted texts.’’
               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:—­

 ``They a bold pow’r o’er sacred Scriptures take,
   Blot out some clauses and some new ones make.’’