Books in a dead language, and which can be intended for the use of the learned only, will never be accommodated to the colloquial fashions of an intermediate period. Let us consider how it would be in an instance familiar to us. If, for example, in examining two editions of the poems of Chaucer, one of them should be found to retain the original peculiarities of orthography, proper to the author’s time, while, in the other, those peculiarities are all softened down into the forms adopted in the reign of Elizabeth, we should certainly attribute the edition to _that_ period rather than suppose the corrections to have been made by a modern editor. Again:--some copies of ancient authors present instances in which, when a passage is compared with the same in another copy, it is easy to perceive that an early transcriber, having fallen into an error, more than one succeeding transcriber has attempted a restoration of the genuine reading; for the _last_ conjectural emendation has plainly been framed out of two or three prior corrections. Thus it is, then, that the existing manuscripts of the classic authors may be traced up, either by direct evidence, or by unquestionable inferences, very near to the age--and, in many instances--quite up to the age when these works were universally diffused, were familiarly known, and were incessantly quoted by other writers; and when, therefore, the history of each work may easily and abundantly be collected from the testimony of contemporary and succeeding authors. The various facts, above alluded to, serve to connect the literary remains of antiquity--now in our hands, with the period of their pristine existence:--we traverse the long era of general ignorance--that wide gulf which separates the intelligence and civilization of antiquity from the intelligence and civilization of modern times, and we land, as it were, upon the native soil of these monuments of Mind, and we once more find ourselves surrounded by that abundance of evidence which belongs to an advanced state of knowledge. We need not wish to trace the history of _manuscripts_ further, than to the confines of that former world of learning and refinement.