Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/256

 which is a seventh part of the whole book; so that the work of collating is so much the shorter. I had a mind, for the experiment's sake, to collate the first forty Epistles, which are all that the collator has done. And I had finished them in an hour and eighteen minutes, though I made no very great haste. And yet I remarked and set down above fifty various lections, though the Editor has taken notice of one only. Now, if forty Epistles can be collated in an hour and eighteen minutes, the whole MS. which contains but one hundred and twenty-seven Epistles, may be collated in four hours. The collator then, had he been diligent, might have finished the whole collation twice over between noon and the close of the evening, when the book was returned.

As for the collator, I am utterly a stranger both to his person and character, and have nothing to say to him but that his testimony is as useless and imperfect as his collations. Indeed it's hard to conjecture, to what purpose it is produced. The sum of it is that the MS. was sent for before he had finished; which is confessed on all hands. It had been more to the purpose, if he had told us what he was doing all that