72] It is true that they cannot take the place of practical
work, done under the guidance of experts, but they are of very great use
to the experts themselves.[73]

It would be easy to give a list of happy emendations. The most
satisfactory are those whose correctness is obvious palaeographically, as
is the case with the classical emendation by Madvig of the text of
Seneca's Letters (89, 4). The old reading was: "Philosophia unde dicta
sit, apparet; ipso enim nomine fatetur. Quidam et sapientiam ita quidam
finierunt, ut dicerent divinorum et humanorum sapientiam ..."--which
does not make sense. It used to be supposed that words had dropped out
between _ita_ and _quidam_. Madvig pictured to himself the text of the
lost archetype, which was written in capitals, and in which, as was
usual before the eighth century, the words were not separated (_scriptio
continua_), nor the sentences punctuated; he asked himself whether the
copyist, with such an archetype before him, had not divided the words at
random, and he had no difficulty in reading: "...ipso enim nomine
fatetur quid amet. Sapientiam ita quidam finierunt...." Blass, Reinach,
and Lindsay, in the works referred to in the note, mention several other
masterly and elegant emendations. Nor have the Hellenists and Latinists
any monopoly; equally brilliant emendations might be culled from the
works of Orientalists, Romancists, and Germanists, now that texts of
Oriental, Romance, and Germanic languages have been subjected to verbal
criticism. We have already stated that scholarly corrections are
possible even in the text of quite modern documents, reproduced
typographically under the most favourable conditions.

Perhaps no one, in our day, has equalled Madvig in the art of
conjectural emendation. But Madvig himself had no high opinion of the
work of modern scholarship. He thought that the humanists of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in this respect, better
trained than modern scholars. The conjectural emendation of Greek and
Latin texts is, in fact, a branch of sport, success in which is
proportionate not only to a man's ingenuity and palaeographical instinct,
but also to the correctness, rapidity, and delicacy of his appreciation
of the niceties of the classical languages. Now, the early scholars were
undoubtedly too bold, but they were more intimately familiar with the
classical languages than our modern scholars are.

However that may be, there can be no do