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| Volume 4, Page 465
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printer's error" !! Large inq. has been provok. by this bold assumption
and unusual state of things. The first result is from collation by Mr.
Livermore of the copy in College Libr. of "Antinomians and Familists,"
with the Athemaeum copy of the "Short Story," and he assures me that
it is apparent that from p. 1 to 66, where the Athenaeum copy breaks
off, the correspondence is perfect in every letter, typographical error
or not, as l. 6 on p. 46 spread has the let. r pushed out of its place, so
that the lower is as high as the upper part of the letters on either side: -as
p. 1 of Short Story, begins with signat. B. in the copy that has sixteen
or eighteen pages of prefatory matter, so begins with signat. B. the
copy devoid of those pages; and so on p. 9 in each of these books is signature
C -- on 17 D -- on 25 E, &c. with the trifling except. on p. 62,
1. 8, the parag. ends in one with the words "slighted had so much," in
the other, "had so much slighted," no letter being changed. An expert
in printing, or even an apprentice, would judge of Antinomians and
Familists, &c. from sig. B on p. 1, that sig. A had once preced. it, tho.
page 1 follows next aft. title-page. Mr. Marvin, an accomplish, printer,
on first sight observ. that the Preface had been suppressed, and that the
title-page was print. from the same form as Short Story, substituting
other words, for all above the imprint. Indeed, to suppose it possib. that
the work, without the preface, was issued first, is very like the expectat.
of seeing the second story of an edifice sustain itself in the air before
the first is built for its support. The forms are identical, the ornaments
unchanged, as on the title-pages of both a border of twenty-one types or
beads runs by the sides, nineteen more at the top, and eighteen at the
bot.; and no letters were distrib. from the form to the case betw. the
strikings off for one and the other through the whole. Yet so widely
differ the title-pages, that one would judge instantly, that years might
interven. betw. them, one showing only forty-one words, the other, one
hundred and fifty-six, above the imprint; while that imprint of three
lines disproves the whole cunning of the change, for there exactly as in
the body of the two books, all the letters, and figures, and imperfections,
and punctuation, and errors, were immovable. The words above the
imprint in one are removed from the other, and new ones inserted,
except the very large letters of the single word NEW-ENGLAND
running wholly across the wide page, some of wh. the keen eye of my
young friend, W. H. Whitmore, detected as unmoved; and a less practised
vision would instantly perceive, when directed to it, how the first E
in that word differs from the sec. E and confidently assume that the
enormity of the first E might prove it to be the only one of the kind in
the print. office of Ralph Smith. The last letter but one of that word
in a copy wh. to me seems clearly, by a hundred indicat. to have been
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