many faults been perpetrated as in the
Bible.

Pope Sixtus the Fifth caused an edition
of the Vulgate to be published in Rome, in
fifteen hundred and ninety, every proof of
Which he had carefully corrected himself; and
at the end of the volume he affixed a bull, by
which he excommunicated any one who
should venture to make any alteration in the
text. This bull caused a great deal of amusement,
— for the Bible was found to be full of
mistakes; and the Pope, in consequence, was
obliged to suppress the edition. A copy of it
is a great rarity, and of course fetches a high
price. Brunet, in his "Manuel du Libraire,"
says that a large-paper copy was disposed of
at the sale of Camus de Limare for twelve
hundred and ten francs. I dare say it would
fetch a great deal more at Sotheby's, at the
present moment. The English Bibles contain
several remarkable misprints. The edition of
sixteen hundred and thirty-four, printed in
London, has, in the Twelfth Psalm, "The
fool hath said in his heart there is God,"
instead of "there is no God." This edition
was suppressed by order of the King. In
another London edition (sixteen hundred and
fifty-three, in quarto), we read, "In order
that all the world should perceive the means
of arriving at worldly riches." instead of
"godly riches." The editions of Field, the
printer to the University of Cambridge in
the seventeenth century, are full of misprints.
It is said that he received a present of fifteen
hundred pounds from the Independents to
print "ye" for "we," in the sixth verse of the
third chapter of the Acts, in order to make it
appear that the right of choosing their
pastors emanated from the people, and not
from the Apostles:—"Wherefore, brethren,
look ye out among you seven men of honest
report, full of the Holy Ghost and of wisdom,
whom ye (we) may appoint over this business."
In the same Bible, in Corinthians
(I. vi. 9), we find, "Know ye not that the
unrighteous shall (not) inherit the kingdom
of God,"—omitting the second "not." At
the Clarendon Press, in sixteen hundred and
seventeen, a Bible was printed which was
known as the Vinegar Bible, on account of
the title of the twentieth chapter of St. Luke,
in which "Parable of the Vineyard" is
printed "Parable of the Vinegar." To show
how dangerous it is to assert infallibility
while correcting the press, I may mention
that in the Curiosités Bibliographiques (a
scarce book, though published in Paris only
in eighteen hundred and forty-seven), from
whence I have derived several of the above-
noticed misprints, the word "vinegar" is
printed "vinegard" The omission of the
negative has occurred more than once in
printing the Seventh Commandment. This
happened with an edition published in the
reign of Charles the First; and for making
it, the printers were summoned before the
High Commission, and fined three thousand
pounds. The same omission occurred in the
thirty-fourth edition of the Bible, printed at
Halle, which was confiscated, and is now a
great biblical rarity. All scriptural
misprints are not, as we have seen in the case of
Field, the result of accident. There is
another on record, which betrays a deep— and
may I add?— a most nefarious design. It was
the design of a printer's widow in Germany
to upset the whole system of the domestic
economy. A new edition of the Bible was
being printed in her house; and, one night
when all the workmen were absent, she rose
from her comfortless couch (a German bed
always is comfortless, lie in it how you will),
and proceeded to the printing-room, there to
tamper with the type and falsify a text that had
caused her much trouble. Her defunct spouse
had, without doubt, given her frequent cause
to protest in her heart against that sentence
of woman's subjection which is pronounced
upon Eve in the third chapter of Genesis.
To rescue her sex from its false position, she
resolved to alter the relative positions of the
parties, and taking out the first two letters
of the word "herr," cunningly replaced them
by "na." By this means the decree ran,
"And he shall be thy FOOL (narr)," instead
of "he shall be thy LORD (herr)." This
substitution, though submitted to in domestic
life—as, I dare say, was the case—was not
suffered to pass unpunished by those who
were in authority, and the widow was burnt
for heresy. Some copies of this edition are
said to have been secreted, and are possibly
to be found in the private libraries of a few
strong-minded women.

But, besides the Bible, there are many
other works whose basis is religion, which
have been treated so carelessly by the printer,
as almost to justify the supposition that has
been more than once entertained, of diabolic
interference. A work intituled Missae ac
Missalis Anatomia, printed in fifteen hundred
and sixty-two, contains one hundred and
sixty-eight pages in octavo, and errata occupying
fifteen pages. The compiler of the errata,
to excuse their number, relates the various
artifices resorted to by the devil to frustrate
the good effects which the book would have
caused. " When the work was printed," he
says, " that cursed Satan made use of all his
tricks, and succeeded in disfiguring it by so
many mistakes (for certain passages contain
no sense at all, and others give exactly the
contrary meaning to that intended) in order
to prevent the pious from reading it, or to
weary its readers so effectually that none, without
extreme disgust, could get to the end of the
volume. Even before the manuscript was
placed in the printer's hands, this same Satan
threw it in the dirt, and it was so defaced
with wet and mud, that the writing was
almost effaced, and whole pages were entirely
spoilt. Besides, the book was so terribly
torn, that not only was it impossible to read
it, but it could not be opened without the