Excerpt from Hermathena: A New Edition of Manilius, Book 1

Bentley the first of Manilian emendators: I think him far inferior to Scaliger. Many much humbler scholars have made conjectures on the Aslrorzomica which are, I will not say more likely to be right than Bentley's, but which, I do not fear to say, are less certainly wrong. That this is so, is sufficiently proved by inspecting any considerable passage as printed in Bentley's edition, and then com paring it either with Scaliger's or with Jacob's. It will be found that whole lines are given by Bentley in a corrected form which, if we found it in a ms., we should not hesitate to call an interpolation. At the present time, and mainly owing to the powerful in¿uence of Lachmann, Madvig, and Cobet, the limits of conjectural emendation are bounded far more straitly than in the time of Bentley and Markland. Both these scholars allowed themselves a free dom which neither Lachmann nor Madvig nor Cobet would ever have thought of. The reason of which is that palaeo graphy has in the meantime erected itself into something like a science. Mss. Teach us the possible and impossible in alteration. Hence much that Bentley and Markland offer in this line is now at once rejected, not that their corrections are not always linguistically plausible, but that, on palaeographical grounds, they are inconsistent with the new training. This gospel of our day may be a hard saying, but it has to be said, and it is repeated here because from the work I am reviewing, it might be thought that, in the case of Bentley, if not ofmarkland, a dispensing clause interfered with rules by which all modern scholars are bound.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.