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the earlier must be decided partly by external, partly by internal considerations. The latter will speak for themselves, and it may be taken for granted that no one will doubt the great superiority on the whole of the text of the Oxford reprint to the other, or hesitate to mark in it many designed improvements and corrections which betray a later hand (Appendix B II. pp. lxxxviii.–xc.), while the instances in which the Syndics’ book is superior or not inferior to the other (App. B I. pp. lxxxvi., lxxxvii.) are scanty, slight, and incapable of suggesting the converse inference1. Both contain innumerable errors of the press, some peculiar to a single issue2, not a few (including nearly all the false textual references in the margin, see Sect. VI. p. lvi.) common to both. It is useful to remember one characteristic erratum of each, which will enable us to determine at a glance to which recension a particular volume in our hands belongs. The Syndics’ copy and its fellows have “Judas” instead of “Jesus” in Matt. xxvi. 36; the Oxford reprint and its associates read twice over the following words in Ex. xiv. 10 “the children of Israel lift up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them, and they were sore afraid: and” the printer’s eye wandering back from the second “the children of Israel” in the verse, to the first3. Yet in spite of this portentous blunder, the recension which contains it is decidedly the more correct of the two, and irresistibly forces on the mind of any one that has minutely studied both, that whether we regard emendations of the sense or comparative exemption from typographical oversights, it had undergone revision, fitful and superficial perhaps, but not the less real on that account. Hence it is not quite reasonable, in answer to the enquiry “Which of the two issues was first printed?” to say with Mr Fry, “I do not think that any evidence on this point can be adduced, from the existence of an error in one, and the absence of it in another copy” (A Description, &c. p. 23). Not certainly from noting a single error or from noting twenty, for such an argument is cumulative in its weight, and can only be appreciated by patient enquirers: but if, out of two books substantially the same, one shall prove on examination more free than the other from mechanical imperfections and printers’ errata, and at the same time full of small yet unequivocal corrections whether of the style or the matter of the performance, we cannot doubt that, in the absence of any considerable proof to the contrary, the common consent of mankind would pronounce that the better executed volume must needs be the later of the two.

And what considerable proof to the contrary has Mr Fry been able to allege? Direct evidence on the subject there is none, for never was a great enterprise like the production of our Authorized Version carried out, with less knowledge handed down to posterity of the labourers, their method and order of working. There still remains the bibliographical branch of this investigation, and this will demand some attention. The first point we take up makes little in favour of Mr Fry’s view of the priority of that issue which the Oxford reprint follows with such faithful exactness. All copies of the other issue which have a title-page at all, exhibit a respectable and elaborate woodcut (repeated before the New Testament with the necessary change in the printed words) that had often done duty before, notably in the Bishops’ Bible of 1602. It represents the four Evangelists with their proper emblems at the top and bottom of the cut, the tents and armorial bearings of the twelve tribes on the left of the letter-press, the twelve Apostles on the right of it, the Paschal Lamb slain on the altar beneath it, the Lamb Triumphant under the Incommunicable Name surmounting all. But in many copies of the recension to which the Oxford reprint belongs the title-page is of a totally different character. It is a very elegant copper-plate engraving,