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.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, January 27, 2023
Conjectural Criticism
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 23.3 (1902) 345-350 (at 348):