346 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



kneeled," read had. Page 182, for "In beds they tum- 

 bled off their own," read of. Page 184, for "in mine 

 one monument I lie," read owne. Page 212, for " Deu- 

 calion's 6/acMung stone," read "backflung." Of the 

 punctuation we shall give but one specimen, and that a 

 fair average one : 



" Naso to his Tibullus flung the wreath, 

 He to Catullus thus did each bequeath. 

 This glorious circle, to another round, 

 At last the temples of a god it bound." 



Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this 

 for themselves. 



Time brings to obscure authors* an odd kind of repa- 

 ration, an immortality, not of love and interest and ad- 

 miration, but of curiosity merely. In proportion as 

 their language was uncouth, provincial, or even barba- 

 rous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which 

 only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pas- 

 try-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that 

 makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, 

 and its name shall accordingly live forever in a note. Is 

 not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none 1 And 

 if literary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Bru- 

 netto Latini's made him insensible for a moment to the 

 rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors of such 

 books as are not properly literature may still comfort 

 themselves with a non omnis moriar, laying a mournful 

 emphasis on the adjective, and feeling that they have 

 not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo 

 a fragmentary continuance on earth. To be sure, the 

 immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves 

 than to the famous men they help to illustrate. If they 

 escape oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they 



* Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. 



