The revision of _jeux d’esprit_ for the sake of augmented effect may be more or less venial; and where the primary object is to amuse, and no vital chord is touched, the reduction of details to an intelligible and impressive shape is possibly a benefit to the public, which might not appreciate the account unground and unpolished. There are so many hazards and drawbacks attendant on _vivâ-voce_ delivery; and the editor, after all, only stands to the humourist in a parallel relation to that which the reporter occupies towards parliamentary proceedings. He does not render them precisely as he had them from the speakers’ mouths, but as the latter would have given them if they had had the opportunity of correcting the proofs. It virtually amounts to an extension of the authority of literature over unwritten matter. The substance and the quantity are preserved, like liquid poured from a tankard into a saucer; but the component parts have changed places, and the record is drafted and printed for future use by a gentleman who considers that he is a finer judge of your meaning than you are yourself. So far, so good. But we are instinctively led hence to the consideration of a different, yet allied, question--as to the frequent habit, on the part of narrators, from one cause or another, of positively tampering with the text of a saying, and falsifying the sense. For it is by no means with non-essentials only that your special artist deals, or even with minor accessories alone. He holds his licence to extend to the finding you a new hero--one, possibly, who could never, in his most prophetic mood, have ventured to imagine himself in such a situation or in such company. Sometimes it happens that in a comparatively late chap-book we detect a _rifaccimento_ of an ancient legend. At Glasgow appeared a small roughly printed tract in 1700, with the title of _The New Wife of Beath_, in which we are desired to believe that the text is “Much better Reformed, Enlarged, and Corrected, than it was formerly in the old uncorrect Copy”; and we are farther told that there is “the Addition of many other Things.” The preface adds that the “Papal or Heretical” matter in the former copy has been omitted in this second edition, leaving nothing to offend the wise and judicious, “not being taken up into a literal Sense, but be way of Allegory and Mystical, which thus may edifie.” We have here, in point of fact, the story and adventures of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath subsequently to her dissolution; and we learn how, after a strange series of vicissitudes, including a visit to his majesty the Devil, who declines to take her in, our heroine finally propitiates Christ by a profession of faith, and is placed among the elect. It is a grotesque tissue of piety and blasphemy, presumably adapted to the Protestant ritual and taste by an anonymous son of the Kirk.