ERRATA RECEPTA. 65 



-ousness in regard to great ones. A glance at the Greek original 

 ^hews, of course, that " out " is the proper word. Its blundered re- 

 presentative, " at," has implanted, in the popular mind, the notion, 

 wholly wrong, and rather unbecoming, that there is, in the saying, an 

 allusion to a difficulty experienced in getting some minute and, at the 

 same time, disagreeable thing down the throat. In my black-letter 

 Quarto, of 1615, already referred to, the passage is free from the er- 

 ratum in question. And, among the notes in the margin, I observe 

 one on this place which, judging from the way in which misprints are 

 occasioned, may have been the cause of the original error. That 

 note is an interpretation of the metaphor of the proverb : " Ye stay 

 at that which is nothing, and let pass that which is of great impor- 

 tance." May not a compositor, setting up from a copy containing 

 some such annotation as this, have had his eye drawn aside to the 

 "at," which stands close to its beginning? This instance of typo- 

 graphical inaccuracy has been repeatedly pointed out, but never set 

 right. So long ago as 1754, John Wesley, in his excellent " Expla- 

 natory Notes," exclaimed " It is strange that glaring misprint ' strain 

 at a gnat,' which quite alters the sense, should run through all the 

 editions of our English Bible!" (Vide p. 94, Quarto ed.) It is a 

 curious phenomenon to observe how quickly verbal errors became 

 established, and how their continuance is vulgarly preferred to their 

 removal, even when their character is pointed out. Here we discern 

 the ground of the sad Machiavellian maxim, — " Vult populus decipi ; 

 ergo decipiatur." 



In view of the ease with which a short-lived tradition will invest 

 typographical mistakes with a sort of weight and authority, and of 

 the reluctance with which many men submit to be informed of them, 

 the world is to be congratulated that a certain bull of Pope Sixtus 

 Y., prefixed to an edition of the Vulgate (1585 — 1590), had little 

 effect. It forbade all printers, on pain of excommunication, to vary 

 one jot or tittle from the text then and there presented. The edition 

 was speedily found literally to swarm with misprints. Could the pro- 

 hibition have been enforced for a decade or two, a possibility, nay, as 

 we see, a probability would have been established, of the perpetuation, 

 in after-generations, under sanctions the most solemn, of a number of 

 frivolous errors in language and common thought. 



A local example of the influence of a typographical error, kept for 

 a short space of time before the public eye, may be mentioned. It 



Vol. XI. E 



