this limitation in mind with reference to one of the most comprehensive and also most widely prevalent mental impulses of transcribers, the disposition to smooth away difficulties; which is the foundation of the paradoxical precept to 'choose the harder reading', the most famous of all 'canons of criticism'. Readings having no especial attractiveness to ourselves may justly be pronounced suspicious on grounds of Transcriptional Probability, if they were likely to be attractive, or their rivals unacceptable, to ancient transcribers; and conversely, if this condition is absent, we can draw no unfavourable inferences from any intrinsic excellence which they may possess in our own eyes.
35. The rational use of Transcriptional Probability as textual evidence depends on the power of distinguishing the grounds of preference implied in an ancient scribe's substitution of one reading for another from those felt as cogent now after close and deliberate criticism. Alterations made by transcribers, so far as they are due to any movement of thought, are with rare exceptions the product of first thoughts, not second; nor again of those first thoughts, springing from a rapid and penetrating glance over a whole field of evidence, which sometimes are justified by third thoughts. This is indeed a necessary result of the extemporaneous, cursory, and one-sided form which criticism cannot but assume when it exists only as a subordinate accident of transcription. But even the best prepared textual critic has to be on his guard against hasty impressions as to the intrinsic character of readings, for experience teaches him how often the relative attractiveness of conflicting readings becomes inverted by careful study. What we should naturally expect, in accordance with what has
