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These facts, and especially this last, aroused, I believe, Scot’s compassion and indignation, and made both find vent in printed words. And besides these likelihoods, including that of date, there are two at first sight seemingly contradictory facts, which made themselves manifest to me when I first carefully read the book, and before I had formed any opinion on their causes, and which are on this view reconciled. These facts are, that while the plan which he has adopted, and his facts and conclusions, seem to have been deliberately sought out, thought over, and canvassed, there are evidences throughout of a feverous haste of composition, such feverous haste as the above spoken of emotions would excite in a man like Scot, who had witnessed so horrible and so bloody a perversion of justice. The proof of the first fact I leave to be observed by the intelligent reader; but while the second must also be observed by him, it is needful, to the full exposition of my argument, that I should collect in one view most at least of the details. This haste is evidenced in some of his corrected errata, but more in those that he did not correct. Thus we have, on p. 174, a curious slip, by which Pharaoh becomes a Persian, and Nebuchadnezzar takes Pharaoh’s place as an Egyptian king, for other parts of the book prove conclusively that this was an unintentional lapsus, and one a second time overlooked when the book was re-read before the title-page and the preliminary leaves were set up. Similar are his errors as to Haias and Sedaias, for at one time he speaks of Rabbi Sedaias Haias, repeating it also at the last when he gives his “forren authors” consulted, and between these speaks of them as two persons, as they were. More especially would I call attention to his blunders as to Argerius Ferrerius. He quotes him—yet he is always Ferrarius—five times in his text, twice in his table of contents, and once in his “authors used”. So in his translation from him, the “s” of “verbis” being indistinct in some copies, he read the word as “verbi”, and thereby translated the sentence into such unmistakable nonsense that this alone should have shown him his error. So, also, we have the senseless, because careless, rendering of the sword in hand passage, p. 257; and with these may be classed his adoption of T. R.’s curious mistranslations from Wier’s Pseudomonarchia, or from another copy of the Empto. Salomonis, for a moment’s consideration would have shown him their absurdity, and led him to turn to Wier. In ssss1 also, we find “infants” where, as stated in my note, all the editions of the Mal. Malef. in the British Museum have “infames”; and this, though a slip of memory, betokens, when taken with the rest, overhaste. These slips, in an ordinary writer, would lead to another conclusion, but not in this case, where we have evidence of both ordinary and recondite knowledge, of conclusions tried by actual experiment, of a quick and intelligent perception, and of what may be called, in a good sense, a ready and acute subtlety in refuting or retorting allegations or objections.

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