cting errors. All of us are
not only liable to make mistakes, but all of us do make them; and if any
one has a conceit of his own accuracy, the surest way to take it out of
him is to let him serve an apprenticeship in some library, where there
is competent revision of all the labor performed. There are multitudes of
assistants in libraries who cannot write a letter, even, without making
one or more errors. How often do you leave out a word in your writing
experience, which may change the meaning of a whole sentence? So, in
writing titles, whether for the catalogue, or for a library order, or for
the information of some inquirer, you are liable to make errors of date,
or edition, or place of publication, or size, or to misplace or omit or
substitute some word in the description of the book. There is nothing in
the world quite so easy as to be mistaken: and the only remedy (and it is
an all-essential one) is to go over every line and every word of what you
have written, before it leaves your hands. As second thoughts are
proverbially best, so a second careful glance over a piece of writing
will almost always reveal some error or omission to be corrected. Think
of the mortification you must feel at finding an unverified piece of work
returned upon your hands, with several glaring mistakes marked by the
reviser! Think, on the other hand, of the inward satisfaction experienced
when you have done your best, written and revised your own work, and
found it always passed as perfect. I have tried many persons by many
tests, and while I have found a great number who were industrious,
intelligent, zealous, conscientious, good-tempered, and expeditious, I
have found scarcely one who was always accurate. One of the rarest things
in a library is to find an assistant who has an unerring sense of the
French accents. This knowledge, to one expert in that language, even if
he does not speak it, should be as intuitive as the art of spelling
correctly, either in English or French. He should write the proper accent
over a letter just as infallibly as he writes the proper letters in a
word. But, strange to say, it is very common, even with good French
scholars (in the book-sense or literary sense of scholarship) to find
them putting the acute accent for the grave over a vowel, or the grave
instead of the acute, or omitting the circumflex accent entirely, and so
on.

Every one commits errors, but the wise man is he who learns by his
mistakes,