Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 36.3 (1915) 358-369 (at 364-365):

I will dismiss the subject, fascinating as it is, with a few remarks on the general subject of conjectural emendation. The tenor will not be unfamiliar to the readers of the Journal, ἀλλ' ὅμως. As an American of the Americans, I can well understand why so few of my countrymen have ventured on speculation that promises so little result, but apart from this consideration, I have long held it to be little short of a crime to advance mere guesses—in the vague hope that some one will adopt them and stand up for them. In the list of WILAMOWITZ'S various readings it has happened a couple of times that emendations abandoned by their authors have found a benevolent patron in him, but that is not to be counted on. Now if one examines Amatus's twenty odd corrections, it will appear that most of them are inevitable, most of them have been taken up into the text. They are all simple, and it is these simple changes that hold their own, simple changes that fall within the range that Kenyon prescribes. The 'splendor' of which WILAMOWITZ writes would not shine in a printer's office to-day. They belong to the realm with which some of us are sadly familiar, the realm of proofreading in which every editor performs feats that would be loudly acclaimed, if the language were Greek or Latin and not the native tongue. Haplography and dittography are no mysteries in practice to some of the confraternity who do not even know these convenient technical terms and who lay no claim to the divinum ingenium ascribed, for instance, to Reiske, for whom indeed every classical scholar entertains the highest esteem. What is the glory of discovering a turned type? What of discovering a caret, the very symbol of which ^ stands for the Greek word λείπει? Who has not found occasion to put asunder what the printer has joined together, and join together what the printer has put asunder. It is a matter of context whether one reads 'this creed' or 'this screed'. But, as I write, the ghosts of dead and buried typographical errors, ghosts, which a flirt of the pen might have laid forever, begin to squeak and gibber in the halls of my memory, 'indefensible' for 'indefeasible,' 'row' for 'vow,' 'fornication' for 'formication,' 'Pythagoras' for 'Protagoras,' 'coöperation' for 'coöptation,' 'chronicle' for 'coracle' and hosts of others, some of them signalized in the various Errata of the Journal, the correction of which would make the reputation of any Greek or Latin scholar. At the same time it must be remembered that there are such things as happy mistakes, and a number of these' felices errores' are recorded by WILAMOWITZ in his commentary. But neither do these lack parallels. In Malherbe's famous 'Rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses.' 'Rose, elle' was originally a printer's error for the author's 'Rosette,' and to my mind one of the best things in all Herbert Spencer is the story that in the sentimental outgiving 'Pour connaître l'amour, il faut sortir de soi' the idealistic 'de soi' became in type the realistic 'le soir.'