Astronomicon

he thought and wrote like a sane man and a grown man. His edition therefore, when at last it came, was a severe disappointment; and on a general view it detracts from his merit. It was not senile, but it showed that an edition was an undertaking beyond his powers.

His recension is to be commended in so far as it maintains a fairly just balance between the rival mss manuscripts and avoids the bias of Bechert on one side and of Jacob on the other; but his use and choice of emendation was haphazard, and his own new conjectures, extorted by the task of editing, were without exception worthless. In his apparatus criticus critical notes he persisted in retaining the cod. Cusanus Cusanus manuscript, because he was much too old to take example by me; he wantonly deceived the less wary of his readers with an inaccurate collation of G, which others had collated accurately; and his collation of L, which should have been a boon and a blessing, because much fuller and more minute than Bechert’s, was an insidious peril and a pernicious nuisance. His eyesight was evidently feeble, and did not serve him well in collating mss or correcting proofs; but that is not enough to account for the bucketfuls of falsehood which he discharged on an ignorant and confiding public. In book III, which is much the shortest book, his apparatus, consisting of fewer than 350 lines, contains more than 110 definitely false statements: I do not reckon its frequent and deceitful omissions, nor the equally deceitful consequences of the editor’s ignorance of his trade.* He says in vol. I pp. x sq. ‘I have taken pains to ensure that, where the text had been changed by conjecture, it would be known what the manuscripts exhibited’ original: "sedulo caui, ne, ubi textus coniecturis mutatus esset, quid codices exhiberent, ignoraretur"; but it is far from the truth: he has silently substituted pristis for cetus I 433, fugientis for fulgentis 583, atque for que 801, ubi for ubique 808, demissus for dimissus 821, pectore for lumine 845, f. non umquam for numquam f. 876, tibi for sibi II 223, ferae for suae 533, quae for qua 849, furuum for fuluum 912, and so forth. The authorship of emendations

• As when at III 52 he implies, without intending it, that half his mss omit undam. For a tiny sample of this ubiquitous inexpertness take the apparatus of his first page, just over four lines in length: I should premise that it contains three misprints, which are corrected at the end of vol. II with a new misprint to keep the pot boiling. Verse 1: text artes, note ‘artes glcu’: those four are all his mss, why then the note? because, like many another, it is a note not on his own text but on Jacob’s, which here has artis. Verse 5: text nutantis, note ‘nutantis lu2, imitantis u1’: what then have gc? Verse 21: text aestu, note ‘estu lu’: who wants to know that? and gc have the same. Verse 22: text rerum, note ‘circum u2 circum u1 (in marg. rerum) rerum ω’: wrong end foremost, with the lemma at the tail. Verse 23: text inmenso, note ‘inmenso l’: what then have the other mss? and why was there no note at 14, where again the text has inmenso and the mss have just what they have here? Verse 24: text inmittit, note ‘inmittit l’: again, what have the others?