hree times too often. You therefore, fair
reader, understand that for _your_ accommodation exclusively, I explain
the meaning of this word. It is Greek; and our sex enjoys the office and
privilege of standing counsel to yours, in all questions of Greek. We
are, under favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. So that
if, by accident, you know the meaning of a Greek word, yet by courtesy
to us, your counsel learned in that matter, you will always seem _not_
to know it.

A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by
reiterated successions.

What was the reason that the Greeks and the Romans had not the advantage
of printed books? The answer will be, on ninety-nine persons in a
hundred--Because the mystery of printing was not then discovered. But
this is altogether a mistake. The secret of printing must have been
discovered many thousands of times before it was used, or _could_ be
used. The inventive powers of man are divine; and also his stupidity is
divine--as Cowper so playfully illustrates in the slow development of
the _sofa_ through successive generations of immortal dulness. It took
centuries of blockheads to raise a joint stool into a chair; and it
required something like a miracle of genius, in the estimate of elder
generations, to reveal the possibility of lengthening a chair into a
_chaise-longue_, or a sofa. Yes, these were inventions that cost mighty
throes of intellectual power. But still, as respects printing, and
admirable as is the stupidity of man, it was really not quite equal to
the task of evading an object which stared him in the face with so broad
a gaze. It did not require an Athenian intellect to read the main secret
of printing in many scores of processes which the ordinary uses of life
were _daily_ repeating. To say nothing of analogous artifices amongst
various mechanic artisans, all that is essential in printing must have
been known to every nation that struck coins and medals. Not, therefore,
any want of a printing art--that is, of an art for multiplying
impressions--but the want of a cheap material for _receiving_ such
impressions, was the obstacle to an introduction of printed books even
as early as Pisistratus. The ancients _did_ apply printing to records of
silver and gold; to marble and many other substances cheaper than gold
and silver, they did _not_, since each monument required a _separate_
effort of inscription. Simply this defect it was of a cheap