Laudator Temporis Acti

A.E. Housman, "Tucker's Supplices of Aeschylus," Classical Review 4.3 (March, 1890) 105-109 (at 105):

The learner who attacks the play with this commentary will find unfailing help by the way and acquire much information before his journey's end. The old miserable experiences of the classical student who wants to understand what he reads, his lonely fights with difficulties whose presence the editor has never apprehended, his fruitless quest of a meaning in notes where the editor has rendered Greek nonsense into English nonsense and gone on his way rejoicing, are not repeated.

Id. (at 107):

When Mr. Tucker's [approximately 200] conjectures are not palaeographically improbable they are apt to be causeless and even detrimental. Among the axioms assumed in the preface are the following: 'the reading in the text must hold its place until such cause to the contrary can be shewn as will satisfy a rigidly impartial tribunal. The onus probandi lies entirely with the impugner of the text.' 'The conditions of dispossession are these. It must either be proved that the reading is an impossibility, or else that in point of grammar it is so abnormal, or in point of relevance so manifestly inappropriate, as to produce a thorough conviction that the MS. is in error.' I for my part should call this much too strict; but these are Mr. Tucker's principles. His practice is something quite different: in practice no word, however good, is safe if Mr. Tucker can think of a similar word which is not much worse.

Id. (at 109):

Here I have given proofs enough of the disasters which attend us when we desist from the pursuit of truth to follow after our own inventions. Thus much it was necessary to say, because the many students who will I hope resort to this edition for help and instruction must be warned that they will find not only what they seek but also a good deal which they are not to believe. The book however in spite of its faults the most useful edition of the Supplices we have. The purely explanatory part of the commentary does not contain very much that is absolutely new, and this is well; for it is really a far more venturesome thing, if critics would but understand it, to propose a new rendering than a new reading.