It is chiefly the dentals t and d that are thus suppressed before words commencing with a mute consonant; and it is surprising what a number of words there are in common use that have been thus curtailed. Thus in and the d is rarely sounded, even before vowels; of is so generally pronounced o' that it were needless printing it so, as is usual in the dramatists, were it not that o' represents on as well as of; we all say "Who did you see?" though we should write it "Whom did you see?" Instances, in fine, are numberless; but we should keep the principle constantly in mind. See the note on sly-slow, Rich. II. i. 3; and on by peeping, Cymb. i. 7.
On the other hand, there is sometimes a transference of a consonant from the end of one word to the beginning of the next, which injures the sense,—ex. gr.,
Thence forth descending to that perilous porch
Those dreadful flames she also found delayed.
F. Q. iii. 12. 42.
Here the poet probably wrote allayed, and the printer transferred to it the d of found. See on Temp. iv. 1.
While treating of elision, it may not be useless to remark that when a word beginning with h is monosyllabic, or is not accented on its first syllable, the h is not sounded. Any one who will observe will find that his, for example, is usually pronounced is; so that there is no occasion for the 's of the dramatists. So we should write and pronounce a history, but write an historian and pronounce an 'istorian; for a historian, as it is too often written and pronounced, makes a most unpleasant hiatus. We may observe how constantly the aspirate is suppressed in the poetry of Greece and Rome.
The errors of transcribers and printers are Omission, Addition, Transposition, Substitution. Of these I will now give instances, chiefly from my own experience. I must, however, previously notice the rather curious fact, that these four sources of error, which I had traced out in our printed works, are all, and no other, acted upon by that, in my mind, most able of the German critics, J. Olshausen, in that chef d'œuvre of criticism, his Comment on the Book of Psalms, thus showing how universal they are.
7.
Omission.—If any one will examine a proof-sheet as it comes from the hands of a compositor, he will find abundant instances of this source of error. One would think that such could hardly escape the author's eye; and yet, in the edition of Ben Jonson's plays corrected by himself, almost the only errors detected by the editors have been those of omission; and a few more have, I think, escaped them. I may add that the words supplied by them seem to me to be almost invariably the very words which had been omitted. In Notes and Queries (3 S. vii.) there is a list of the principal errata in the reprint of the First Folio, in 1808; and the far larger portion of them are omissions which can easily be supplied. From my own experience in the case of reprints, I can further assert that corrections of this kind are by no means a matter of hap-hazard; for where I have supplied the words I supposed lost or altered I have almost invariably found, on referring to the original edition, that I had hit on the exact word. As an instance, in a late reprint of Akenside's Poems, the following line occurs in the Hymn to the Naiads: