Edward Leigh, in his thin folio volume entitled On Religion and Learning, 1656, was forced to add two closely printed leaves of errata.

Sometimes apparent blunders have been intentionally made; thus, to escape the decree of the Inquisition that the words fatum and fata should not be used in p 80any work, a certain author printed facta in his book, and added in the errata ``_for_ facta read fata.’’

In dealing with our own older literature we find a considerable difference in degree of typographical correctness; thus the old plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are often marvels of inaccuracy, and while books of the same date are usually supplied with tables of errata, plays were issued without any such helps to correction.  This to some extent is to be accounted for by the fact that many of these plays were surreptitious publications, or, at all events, printed in a hurry, without care.  The late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps, in his curious privately printed volume (A Dictionary of Misprints, 1887), writes:  ``Such tests were really a thousandfold more necessary in editions of plays, but they are practically non-existent in the latter, the brief one which is prefixed to Dekker’s Satiro-Mastix, 1602, being nearly the only example that is to be found in any that appeared during the literary career of the great dramatist.’’

In other branches of literature it is p 81evident that some care was taken to escape misprints, either by the correction of the printer’s reader or of the author.  Some of the excuses made for misprints in our old books are very amusing.  In a little English book of twenty-six leaves printed at Douay in 1582, and entitled A true reporte of the death and martyrdome of M. Campion Jesuite and Preiste, and M. Sherwin and M. Bryan Preistes, at Tiborne the first of December 1581, is this notice at the end:—­

``Good reader, pardon all faultes escaped in the printing and beare with the woorkmanship of a strainger.’’

Many of Nicholas Breton’s tracts were issued surreptitiously, and he protested that many pieces which he had never written were falsely ascribed to him. The Bower of Delights was published without the author’s sanction, and the printer (or publisher) Richard Jones made the following address ``to the Gentlemen Readers’’ on the blunders which had been made in the book:—­

``Pardon mee (good Gentlemen) of my presumption, & protect me, I pray you,p 82 against those Cavellers and findfaults, that never like of any thing that they see printed, though it be never so well compiled.  And where you happen to find fault, impute it to bee committed by the Printers negligence, then (otherwise) by any ignorance in the author:  and especially in A 3, about the middest of the page, for LIME OR LEAD I pray you read LINE OR LEAD.  So shall your poore Printer haue just cause hereafter to be more carefull, and acknowledge himselfe most bounden (at all times) to do your service to the utmost of his power.
               ``Yours R. J., PRINTER.’’