of preface to an argument, lexicon in hand, proving that the applicability of the term optimist is `obvious.’  An editor, at intervals of leisure, indulges his true poetic taste for the pleasure of his p 77friends, or the entertainment of an occasional audience.  Then his book appears, entitled not Miscellaneous Poems, but Asleep in the Sanctum, by A. A. Hopkins.  Sometimes, not satisfied with one enigma, another is added.  Here we have The Great Iron Wheel; or, Republicanism Backwards and Christianity Reversed, by J. R. Graves.  These titles are neither new nor scarce, nor limited to any particular class of books.  Every case, almost every shelf, in every library contain such.  They are as old as the art of book-making.  David’s lamentation over Saul and Jonathan was called The Bow.  A single word in the poem probably suggested the name.  Three of the orations of AEschines were styled The Graces, and his letters The Muses.’’

The list of bibliographical blunders might be indefinitely extended, but the subject is somewhat technical, and the above few instances will give a sufficient indication of the pitfalls which lie in the way of the bibliographer—­a worker who needs universal knowledge if he is to wend his way safely through the snares in his path.

CHAPTER V.

LISTS OF ERRATA.

THE errata of the early printed books are not numerous, and this fact is easily accounted for when we recollect that these books were superintended in their passage through the press by scholars such as the Alduses, Andreas, Bishop of Aleria, Campanus Perottus, the Stephenses, and others.  It is said that the first book with a printed errata is the edition of Juvenal, with notes of Merula, printed by Gabriel Pierre, at Venice, in 1478; previously the mistakes had been corrected by the pen.  One of the longest lists of errata on record, which occupies fifteen folio pages, is in the edition of the works of Picus of Mirandula, printed by Knoblauch, at Strasburg, in 1507.  A worse case of blundering will be found in a little book of only one p 79hundred and seventy-two pages, entitled Miss ac Missalis Anatomia, 1561, which contains fifteen pages of errata.  The author, feeling that such a gross case of blundering required some excuse or explanation, accounted for the misprints by asserting that the devil drenched the manuscript in the kennel, making it almost illegible, and then obliged the printer to misread it.  We may be allowed to believe that the fiend who did all the mischief was the printer’s ``devil.’’

Cardinal Bellarmin tried hard to get his works printed correctly, but without success, and in 1608 he was forced to publish at Ingolstadt a volume entitled Recognitio librorum omnium Roberti Belarmini, in which he printed eighty-eight pages of errata of his Controversies.