Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 23.3 (1902) 345-350 (at 348):

For conjectural criticism demands the highest faculties. One must not only be master of all the possibilities and all the probabilities, every shade of vocabulary, every propriety of syntax, the period of the language, the sphere of the author, his thought, his habits. There must be added to all this the gift of insight that no apparatus however elaborate can replace. Otherwise conjectures are random guesses, which are so many impertinences to the busy mortals who are trying to understand their texts. Of course, a fair knowledge of the language and a certain palaeographic vision will suffice for a modest line of emendation; and every hour of the twenty-four some obscure proof-reader in some back room of a newspaper office is making corrections which would be classed among the palmares emendationes, if they were published in the critical apparatus of a Greek or Latin text.