For general interest, here's an posting from alt.language.latin which mentioned Project Gutenberg. It's not very complimentry, but it does say that we got the passage in question correct. Andrew Newsgroups: alt.language.latin Date: 2005-01-12 04:06:38 PST James A. Temple wrote:
"August de Man" <audeman apenstaart wanadoo punt nl> wrote in message news:41e4e2b0$0$47653$cd19a363@news.wanadoo.nl...
I wondered about "contemplar", and rightly so, because Dr. Watson doesn't > cite Horace quite correctly. It should have been: sic solitus: 'populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.' Search for "nummos contemplar" and it's all about Sherlock Holmes; search for "nummos contemplor", and you find the Latin texts.
Fascinating! The text from which I copied the line attributed to Dr. Watson was from the Easton Press publication of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes". An excerpt from the title page reads, "A definitive text, corrected and edited by Edgar W. Smith, ...". I suppose we shall never know whether Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was responsible for the errant "letter", followed by an oversight of Edgar W. Smith or whether Smith made the change himself. The plot thickens.
As a general rule (and you should have learned this in the course of a long life), it is unwise to place too much trust in what you might read on title pages. Simple errors such as this are easily introduced by compositors when reprinting, for example for American editions (which were often pirated). For what it is worth, the Project Gutenberg eText version (and Project Gutenberg are a byword for inaccuracy, mainly due to their choice of editions) has the quotation correctly. They claim to be reproducing the 1887 text, if you can believe that :-)