F. Q. v. 12. 43.
As the rimes are deserved, preserved, observed, the poet must have written e'er swerved or nothing swerved.
In her right hand a fire-brand she did toss.
F. Q. iii. 12, 17.
The rimes are embost, lost, so that Spenser must have written tost, making, as usual, a dissyllable of fire. That it was not the poet himself that made the mistake is clear; for in
Till Arthur all that reckoning defrayed (ii. 10, 49)
the edition of 1750 has did defray.
A contrary error to this is where the printer has made one word of two, caused either by sound or by illegible writing. For instances, see on Com. of Err. iii. 1, Tw. Night, i. 1, Mer. Wives, v. 5, Ant. and Cleop. iv. 9, Macb. iii. 4.
The fact of effacement in the manuscript, on which I have laid such stress in the section on Omission, has also been a cause of substitution; for, the original word having become nearly or totally illegible, the transcriber or compositor, in order to make sense, used to give some term of his own. Thus we have yes for I will, Meas. for Meas. iii. 1, yea for even so, Rich. II. iii. 1, ay for I will, Ham. iv. 7, as is proved by the metre. These are all at the beginning of the line, and hence their liability to effacement. See also on All's Well, ii. 1, Twelfth Night, iv. 3, Rich. II. i. 3, and elsewhere.
Finally, substitutions are often quite capricious, making no sense whatever. For "he went circuit," where my manuscript was perfectly legible, I once got "the local circuit;" so also "the merits" for "there an echo;" "establishment" for "established government." In Alison's Life of Lord Castlereagh, one of the pall-bearers at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington was Sir Peregrine Pickle (Maitland); in all editions of Joseph Andrews we have in one place "Sir John" for "Sir Thomas" Booby.