"Ye mountains of Gilboa, no dew nor no rain be upon you, and fields of offerings; for there" &c.—2 Sam. i. 21.
Now surely the royal poet must have written,
Ye mountains of Gilboa, and fields of offering!
No dew and no rain be upon you:
and it appears still more certain when we look at the original Hebrew.
A chief cause of errors of this kind seems to have been the addition, by the author, of one or more lines to a place which he had previously deemed complete, and this addition, having been made in the margin, was taken in by the printer in the wrong place; as such I regard the transposition in M. N. D. ii. 1. Another cause was the omission of something by a transcriber, who, when he detected his error, wrote what he had left out in the margin, and the next transcriber or the printer carelessly inserted it in the wrong place. Of this we have very striking instances in the Chorus to Hen. V. ii., 2 Hen. VI. iii. 1, and Rom. & Jul. iii. 3. As in these cases, entire lines or even couplets get out of place, sometimes parts of lines (King John, iii. 3, Rich. II. v. 3), at other times single words. Thus adjectives change places (Temp. i. 1. iv. 1), and substantives do the same (All's Well, ii. 3, M. N. D. ii. 1, L. L. L. iv. 3). The following is a notable instance. In Massinger's Maid of Honour (i. 1), a play of which the proofs were probably read by the poet himself, we read, "A gentleman and yet no lord," where the context shows that the very opposite is meant. Gifford saw this, but he did not see the cause, namely, that a and no had changed places in the printer's mind.
I have remarked several errors of this kind in Chaucer, in whom, in fact, they are most numerous—ex. gr.,
And eke in his hert had compassioun.
And in his hert eke had compassioun.
And pitous and just and alway y-liche.