himself the privilege of removing it on the ground of its palpable impropriety: and all this because he wishes to keep the “recensio” of the text distinct from the “emendatio” of the sense (Praef. 1850, p. vi). Surely it were a far more reasonable, as well as a more convenient process, to have reviewed from the first the entire case on both sides, and if the documentary evidence were not unevenly balanced, or internal evidence strongly preponderated in one scale, to place in the text once for all the reading which upon the whole should appear best suited to the passage, and most sufficiently established by authority. But while we cannot accord to Lachmann the praise of wisdom in his design, or of over-much industry and care in the execution of it (_see_ Tischendorf, N. T., Proleg. pp. cvii-cxii), yet we would not dissemble or extenuate the power his edition has exerted over candid and enquiring minds. Earnest, single-hearted, a true scholar both in spirit and accomplishments, he has had the merit of restoring the Latin versions to their proper rank in the criticism of the New Testament, which since the failure of Bentley’s schemes they seem to have partially lost. No one will hereafter claim for the received text any further weight than it is entitled to as the representative of the manuscripts on which it was constructed: and the principle of recurring exclusively to a few ancient documents in preference to the many (so engaging from its very simplicity), which may be said to have virtually originated with him, has not been without influence with some who condemn the most strongly his hasty and one-sided, though consistent, application of it. Lachmann died in 1851.