Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/457

 APPENDIX. 415 allowed to glide quietly into the text. For example : In one of the lists of wounded officers, I or my printers chanced to leave out the name of Colonel Smith. Upon the omission becoming known to me, I attached to the passage a mark of reference, which seizes the eye of the reader and carries him to the foot of the page, where instantly he sees it stated that Colonel Smith was one of the wounded. In this way the omitted fact is presented to the reader more effectually than it would have been if the word 'Smith' had been blended with the text, stand- ing there with thirteen other names. Eut also, by this method, I acknowledge and publicly record against myself every single inaccuracy, however minute and trivial, which had struck me as requiring correction when last I went through the book. "Whether I could have been so venturesome as to do thus, if the emendations required had been many and important, I will not undertake to say. As it is, I am enabled to take this method of courting any criticism which may be founded upon my confessions of error. The plan, therefore, is a fair one ; but it is also, I think, very needful to adopt it, and I will say why. The book is undergoing discussion ; and in order that the conflict it raises may be honestly waged, it seems right to take care that the subject of dispute shall not be a shifting thing — a thing shifting this way and that under stress of public scrutiny. Again, there is a charge now pending. Rightly or wrongly, the accusers say that in public journals — in journals still sold under honourable titles — the writers are now and then suffered to misstate the tenor of books ; and it seems that the printed accounts which have been given of this work are put forward as some of the instances in which misdescription has occurred. I have not myself taken the pains which would warrant me in declaring a