can be no doubt
that, had there been no misprints in Shakespeare's quartos and folios,
half the occupation of Shakespeare scholarship would have been lacking.
Sometimes the original manuscript turns up--unfortunately not in
Shakespeare's case--to confute some or all of the ingenious editors. A
learned professor changed the word "unbodied" in Shelley's "Skylark" to
"embodied," and some critics approved the change; but the poet's
manuscript in the Harvard University Library makes the former reading
clear beyond question. One might say that in these cases the Imp of the
Perverse plants himself like a fatal microbe in the brain of the
unfortunate editor. When that brilliant work, "The Principles of Success
in Literature," by George Henry Lewes, appeared in the "Fortnightly
Review," the expression "tilt stones from a cart" (used to describe
careless writing) was printed with _l_ as the first letter. When the
chapters were reissued in America, the proofreader, warned by the
presence of numerous other gross misprints, naturally corrected the
meaningless "lilt" to the obvious and natural "tilt." This change at
first escaped the attention of the American editor, who in the second
edition insisted on restoring the original misprint and even defended
his misjudgment in a note. It is worth adding that the Oxford English
Dictionary takes the misprint as too obvious for comment and quotes the
passage under "tilt."

The most daring feat of the typographic Angel of the Odd--to adopt
another of Poe's expressions--is the creation of what Professor Skeat
called "ghost words," that is, words that seem to exist but do not. A
misprint in Scott's "Monastery" of "morse" for "nurse" was accepted
without question by readers and gravely explained by scholars. Some of
these words, of which there are scores, are due to the misreading of
crabbed manuscripts, but not a few have originated in the printing
office. It must be remembered that they make their way into the
dictionaries. For another instance let the reader open Worcester's
Dictionary to the word _phantomnation_. He will see it defined as
"illusion" and referred to Pope. In Webster's Dictionary, however, he
will learn its true character, as a ghost word formed by running
together the two words _phantom nation_.

The printing of poetry involves all the possible mistakes liable to
prose and, owing to the form of poetry, some new ones. Thus in
Pickering's Aldine edition of Milton, two words o