Van Ess’s edition was issued with two different title-pages. One of these gives the names of the Protestant editors, Matthaei and Griesbach. But the other omits the names together with the Notanda on the back of the title-page, so that the reader is left in the dark as to the meaning of the symbols Gb, M, etc., in the margin. Most copies omit the Introduction, which contains the Pope’s sanction of the editions of Erasmus and Ximenes. CHAPTER II. MATERIALS OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Even in the age of printing, and with all the security afforded by that invention, it is not always easy or even possible to exhibit or restore the literary productions of a great mind in their original form. One has but to think of the obscurity in which the works of Shakespeare and their early editions are enveloped, or the questions raised over the Weimar edition of Luther’s works. And even when the author’s original manuscript is still preserved, but the proof-sheets, as is usual, destroyed, we cannot always be certain whether occasional discrepancies between the print and the manuscript are intentional or not. Nay, even when the two agree, there is still the possibility that what the author wrote and allowed to be printed was not what he thought or intended to be read. Did Lessing, _e.g._, mean us to read in _Nathan_ ii. 5, 493, “the great _man_ requires always plenty of room,” or “the great _tree_” does so? Various writers, in speaking of this or that artist’s talents or dexterity, have used the words “haud impigre.” To take them at their word, the object of their praise had no such endowment beyond the common. We may be certain that what they meant to convey was the very opposite of what they actually wrote, viz. “haud pigre” or “impigre.” As a rule, however, the purchaser of a modern classic may rely upon reading it in the form in which the author intended it to be circulated. It is quite different in the case of those works which were composed at a time when their multiplication was only possible by means of copying, and specially so in the case of those that are older by a thousand years than the invention of printing. For then every fresh copy was a fresh source of errors, even when the copyist was as painfully exact as it was possible for him to be. It is simply astonishing, in view of all the perils to which literary works have been exposed, to find how much has been preserved, and, on the whole, how faithfully. [Sidenote: Autographs.]