We are prepared to make the utmost allowance for careless, even for licentious transcription; and we can invent excuses for the mistaken zeal, the officiousness if men prefer to call it so, which has occasionally not scrupled to adopt conjectural emendations of the Text.

To be brief, so long as an honest reason is discoverable for a corrupt reading, we gladly adopt the plea.

It has been shewn with sufficient clearness, I trust, in the course of the foregoing chapters, that the number of distinct causes to which various readings may reasonably be attributed is even extraordinary.
But there remains after all an alarmingly large assortment of textual perturbations which absolutely refuse to fall under any of the heads of classification already enumerated.

They are not to be accounted for on any ordinary principle.

And this residuum of cases it is, which occasions our present embarrassment.