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LITERARY FORGERIES
LITERARY FORGERIES

BY

J. A. FARRER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW LANG

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

1907
PREFACE.

Tue following chapters are an excursion into those
shadier paths of literature where the forger or imi-
tator has for his own ends played on the innocent
credulity of mankind. Forbidden paths they may
be to the straighter sect of the lovers of literature ;
but, having found some delectation in them myself,
I have relied on the similar mental constitution of
most men for the hope and belief that they may
have attractions also for others.

The endeavour has been to present a compre-
hensive or bird’s-eye view of literary forgery, and to
convey some idea of the large place it occupies in the
intellectual history of our race, and of the consider-
able influence it has had on the destinies and fortunes
of the world. To this end both selection and con-
densation have been necessary. Where, in so rank
an undergrowth, it would be impossible to deal with
every tare in the garden of letters, it has seemed
best to select for study only the more typical speci-
mens of their kind ; those, that is, which are marked

by most literary distinction ; which have presented the
Vv
vi PREFACE

most difficult problems ; or which have had the most
far-reaching influence on the course of human affairs.
Round all the specimens so selected a large and ex-
tensive literature has grown, and it has been neces-
sary to condense into single chapters the stories of
famous controversies, the literature of which often
runs into libraries, or is only recoverable from
scattered and inaccessible sources.

In these controversies the combatants have often
been so equally matched, and both the thrust and
the parry been so deftly dealt, that it has frequently
been difficult for the mere spectator to adjudge to
either side a decisive victory. For this reason
finality of judgment is not necessarily involved in
the conclusion of a controversy, and many a seem-
ingly settled dispute has in it the germs of renewed
activity. The sanctity that the French attach to
the chose jugée does not appertain to every past
decision in the matter of forgery, nor have I deemed
it any part of my task simply to register the received
opinion. Rather it has seemed better in some cases
either to challenge the received opinion or to suggest
the exercise of a suspended judgment. Suspense of
judgment is one of the highest and most difficult of
the intellectual virtues, having many affinities with
charity in the moral sphere, and it is because the
study of forgery calls so frequently for the exercise
of this quality that it affords so excellent a discipline
PREFACE vii

for the faculties of the mind. Nowhere else is
required a nicer balancing of opposed arguments ;
greater need of accuracy of fact; or a more cautious
arrival at conclusions.

For the idea of such a survey as I have attempted
I am indebted to the chapter on “ Literary Forgeries ”
in D'Israeli’s Curtosities of Literature; for aid in
its execution I am greatly indebted to my friend Mr.
Andrew Lang, who has been kind enough to cast a
critical and corrective eye over the pages of the
proofs. From errors not a few has his skill as a
literary detective preserved me, and for those which
may remain | claim the sole responsibility. I have
also specially to thank him for that portion of the
chapter on Ballad-forgers which relates to the in-
teresting ballad of ‘Auld Maitland,” as well as for
the concluding paragraph of that chapter. Mr.
Lang is so great an authority on ballad-lore that, if
I have any regret, it is only that I have not more
on that subject to offer from his pen. But the
subject is a larger one than can be fairly condensed
properly within the compass of one chapter among
sixteen; and it must suffice to do little more than
indicate how much in this direction still remains to
be explored.

As regards the arrangement, although it is most
natural to proceed from the more ancient to the
more modern, and although this principle has been
viii PREFACE

adopted in the main, yet it has not seemed desirable
to adhere too slavishly to the chronological order.
Since each chapter treats of a subject distinct in it-
self, each can be read independently of the rest,
and altogether regardless of the order of time.
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW LanGc . , s ‘ ,

CHAPTER I.

SoME CLASSICAL FORGERIES. ‘

The Letters of Euripides and othetem'The Letters of Phalavis—The
fables of Esop—The Consolatio of Cicero—Sigonio’s Ovations
in defence of it—Sigonio’s authorship and method—Seraphinus’
fourth book of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum—The Trau frag-
ment of Petronius—The suspicious history of the ‘Supper of
Trimalchio”—Nodot’s additions to Petronius—The fragment
by Marchena.

CHAPTER II.

BERTRAM: “THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN”

Bertram’s origin—His correspondence with Stukeley—The Histaay
of Roman Britain—Richard of Westminster and Richard of
Cirencester—Character of the work—The historical influence
of Richard—Criticism of Karl Wex—The experts at variance—
Bertram’s literary works.

CHAPTER III.

GREEK FORGERY: CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES . 3

The MSS. of Simonides in the British Museum—Those bought by
Sir T. Phillipps—Simonides’ account of Nonnus—His sale of
the Shepherd of Hermas at Leipzic—The History of Uranius—
Dindorf and Simonides—Tischendorf and Lepsius—The Mayer
Papyri at Liverpool—Stewart’s Memoir of Simonides—The
Sinaitic Codex—Was it by Simonides?—The lithographed
letters—Simonides and Demetrius Magnes.

CHAPTER IV.

ITALIAN FoRGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO . : . i
The first works of Annius—His great work on Antiquities—His
recovery of Myrsilus; of fragments of Cato; of Sempronius ;
of two books of Pictor’s Roman history; of Archilochus’ De

ix

26

39

67
x SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

PAGE
Temporibus ; of Metasthenes; of the Breviarium of Philo Ju-
dzeus ; of Xenophon’s De Equivocis ; of Antonine’s Itinerary ;
of Berosus; of Manetho—Literary dispute about Annius—The
“Tabula Cibellaria ”.

CHAPTER V.

PsALMANAZAR : THE Famous Formosan . z 82
Dr. Johnson and Psalmanazar—The Formosan English Gatediizns
—The Description of Formosa—The sacrifice of boys—The For-
mosa of Candidius and of Psalmanazar—Gold in Formosa—The
Formosan alphabet—Psalmanazar and the Jesuits—Psalman-
azar’s conversion—His anonymous works—His Memoirs—His
later life.

CHAPTER VI.

PouiticaL ForceRY: THE Zrkon BASILIKE . 3 98
Dr. Wordsworth’s theory of the Eikon—Strong internal evidence in
favour of Gauden’s authorship—Coincident use of metaphors ;
of antitheses and of special words—Gauden’s Hieraspistes and
the Eikon—Charles’ works compared with the Eikon—Dugard’s
affidavit about ‘‘the King’s Book,” and Symmons’ recantation
—The indebtedness of the Royalists to Gauden.

CHAPTER VII.

FORGERY IN THE CHURCH. 2 . 126

Motives for early Christian forgeries— Probable fatse Mariyria in
Eusebius—The Martyrs at Lyons and Smyrna—The Bollandist
Martyria—Formation of the Canon—Apocryphal works—The
“False Decretals ’’—Previous collections of Papal decrees—The
objects of the composer—The divinity of Bishops—The “‘ Dona-
tion of Constantine’””—The story of Pope Sylvester and Con-
stantine—Gradual extension of Papal claims—Anselm of Lucca
and the Canon Law—Gratian’s ‘‘ Decretum ’’—-Exposure of the
“ Decretals”’ by De Cusa, Valla and Pococke.

CHAPTER VIII.

THe TRaGEDy OF CHATTERTON ; : 145
The Rowley poems—Walpole’s Castle of Gitranto—Chattertints
deception of Dodsley and Walpole—Correspondence with Wal-
pole—The Chatterton manuscripts in the British Museum—
The “ Battle of Hastings” and Turgot the Monk—The Saxon
translations—Chatterton’s prose fabrications—His last verses
and suicide.
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER IX.

PAGE

THE SHAME OF LAUDER . ; ‘ ; ; 161
Lauder’s charge of plagiarism against Milton—His method of poof
—Reason of his hostility to Milton—Buchanan’s and Johnston’s
Latin versions of the Psalms—Pope on Johnston—Lauder’s
attack on Milton in the Gentleman's Magazine—Richardson’s
Zotlomastix—Lauder and Doctor Johnson—Use of Grotius’
Adamus Exul—Milton’s debt to Vondel and others—Lauder’s
Charles I. Vindicated—The story of Dugard and Milton—How

came Pamela’s prayer into the Ezkon.

CHAPTER X.

Tuer Forcep LETTERS OF BYRON AND SHELLEY . - 175

How Mr. White acquired the Byron and Shelley letters—Mr.
Murray’s purchase of the Byron letters—George Gordon Byron
—His relationship to Lord Byron—His Inedited Works of Lord
Byron—The Sotheby sale in 1850—Mr. Moxon’s purchase of
the Shelley letters—Browning’s Introduction to the Shelley
letters—Detection of the forgery—Mr. White and the Atheneum
—Byron’s life-story.

CHAPTER XI.

A GERMAN ForcEr: FRIEDRICH WAGENFELD . : 1gI
Sanchoniathon’s history of Phenicia—Its translation by Philo
Byblius—The lost books—Wagenfeld’s story of their discovery
—Grotefend’s preface to the history—Character of the work—
The Sanchoniathon Question, by G.L. Grotefend—Publication of
Wagenfeld’s Greek version—Criticism by Muller—Wagenfeld’s
subsequent career.

CHAPTER XII.

A Frencu Forcer: Vrain-Denis Lucas i 202
Lucas and the Marquis Du Prat—Letters sold by Laces: to M.
Chasles—Story of the Comte de Boisjourdain—New claim for
Pascal—Forged Pascal letters—Report of the Academy of
Sciences—Letters of Galileo—M. Verrier’s Memoir—Arrest of
Lucas—Character of the Lucas letters—Lucas and the honour
of France—Lucas’ defence—His indisputable patriotism.

CHAPTER XIII.

Tue MarRIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES ; 215
Autograph-collecting in France—The Diamond Secitaee afi
Mme. La Motte’s Mémoires justificatifs—Fictitious letters of
the Queen—The end of La Motte and Villette—The Count
xii SUMMARY: OF CONTENTS

PAGE
d’Hunolstein’s Correspondance inédite of the Queen—M. Feuillet
de Conches’ letters of the Queen—Rocheterie’s and Beaucourt’s
collection of the Queen’s genuine letters—The falsification of
history.

CHAPTER XIV.

Tuer ImmortTaL Hoax oF IRELAND . 3 226

The performance of “ Vortigern and Rowena "—The share of Sheri-
dan and Kemble in the fraud—Kemble’s acting of Vortigern—
The fate of the play—Burgess’ Prologue—Malone’s Inquiry—
Samuel Ireland’s Vindication—William Henry Ireland—The
Authentic Account of the Shakespearian Manuscripts—Exculpa-
tion of Samuel Ireland—Boswell and the list of Believers—
Shakespeare’s “ Profession of Faith ’—Shakespeare’s addresses
to Ann Hathaway—Webb’s admiration of them—Deceptions
by George Steevens—The later life of W. H. Ireland.

CHAPTER XV.

AMONG THE BaLLaD ForGERs . ; . . 250

Pinkerton’s Scottish Tragic Ballads—Ritson’s exposure and Pinker-
ton’s confession—Sir Walter Scott’s views on forged ballads—
The Ballad of * Auld Maitland”—How Scott acquired it—
Reasons against thinking it a forgery by Hogg—The false
ballads palmed off on Scott by Surtees—Hawker’s ballads of
“ Sir Beville ” and ‘‘ Trelawney ’—Cunningham and Cromek—
Cunningham’s Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Songs—
Motherwell’s ‘‘ Cavalier’s Song’’—Was “ Majesty in Misery ”
the work of Charles I ?—Scott’s ‘‘ Elspeth of the Burnfoot” in
the Antiquary.

CHAPTER XVI.

SomME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES . ‘ . 267

Forgery in fiction—Imitations of Sir Walter Scott—The on
forgery of Walladmor ; the French novels La Pythie des High-
lands and Le Proscrit des Hebrides—The novel of Moredun—
The story of the manuscript by Cabany—The forged novels of
Mrs. Ann Radcliffe—The Baron Lamothe-Langon—Fictitious
memoirs—The Mémoires of Mme. de Créquy and Mme. Du
Barry and the letters of Mme. de Pompadour—The poems of
Clotilde.
INTRODUCTION.

Tue proverb “let ilka herring hang by its ain heid ”
is a good one, and Mr. Farrer’s book does not need
to be accompanied by remarks of mine. In writing
a few words preliminary to his book, I accede to
his request, while conscious that about his curious
topic he knows much more than I do. Literary
forgeries are not exhaustively treated in his volume:
several volumes would be required by the theme.
We might begin with the Homeric poems, of which
by far the greater part, if we accept a prevalent
theory, is a sort of literary forgery, though done,
as a rule, without intent to deceive. Still, it comes
to open forgery, when the supposed editor, subsidised
by Pisistratus, about B.c. 540, introduces, according
to the hypothesis, the speeches of Nestor, for the
purpose of glorifying a descendant of Nestor, the
tyrant of Athens. On this theory Pisistratus must
have been easily pleased, for his ancestor is made a
kind of prosing old Dugald Dalgetty, unconsciously
humorous.

Indeed, if we believe Greek literary tradition,
literary forgery was common as soon as the art of

xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION

writing was used for literary purposes. Solon forged
and put “faked” verses into the /Had for political
ends. Onomacritus forged oracles, as the prophecies
of Thomas the Rymer were forged. Are the pre-
dictions of Merlin more authentic, and when, where,
and by whom were they executed ?

A base gold coin, a sample of early “smashing,”
has been found in a Scottish Lake Dwelling of about
A.D, 600, proving that Lauder, with his Miltonic
forgeries, was only walking in ancestral paths of
guilt. JI daresay that palzeolithic forgers falsely
used the mark of some hand then distinguished, the
Landseer of these early sporting sketches, for man
seems from the beginning to have practised every
form of guile. Doubtless rhapsodists in the Ionian
cities listened to some reciter till they knew his lay
by heart and then gave it forth as their own com-
position : though perhaps that is a case of plagiarism
rather than of forgery.

The entire work of Dares Phrygius, his tale of
Troy, must be a forgery, and it thoroughly took in
the public and the learned of the Middle Ages, who
believed that Dares describes the Trojan war “as
he that saw it”.

Perhaps the real author of the A/istory of the
Trojan War attributed to Dares was merely a
historical novelist, who, by the usual convention,
pretended to have found an ancient manuscript. In
INTRODUCTION xv

any case the pseudo Dares told a good tale, and
provided Boccaccio, Chaucer, Caxton, Henryson,
and Shakespeare with materials for the story of
Trotlus and Cressida.

Perhaps the historical novelist may go too far,
despite his privileges. In writing Zhe Monk of
Fife, years ago, I professed to have discovered the
continuation, in French, of a genuine manuscript
account of Jeanne d’Arc, begun in Latin by her friend,
a Scot, and mysteriously broken off in the middle of a
sentence. 1 even went so far as to forge extracts, in
‘Old French, from the chapel register of St. Catherine
of Fierbois, confirmatory of my narrative. Perhaps
this was wrong. It was a blunder, if not a crime,
for a learned medizvalist could not make out whether
he had a modern novel or a fifteenth century docu-
ment in his hands, while the novel-reading public
exclaimed, ‘Oh, this is a horrid real history!”

Let this be a warning to historical novelists. As
to poets, if the public will not read their poems, is it
likely that they will be read when expressed in
Wardour Street English, Wardour Street spelling,
and attributed to a monk of the fourteenth century ?
Chatterton was guilty of a blunder as well as a
crime, with his old Rowley the monk.

Mr. Farrer does not go deep into historical for-
geries, like those of Hardynge, intended to prove,

by false documents, that Scotland was a dependency
é
xvi INTRODUCTION

of the English Crown. There must be plenty of
this kind of forgery. A memorandum in Foedera, of
29th September, 1278, concerning the homage paid
by Alexander III. of Scotland to Edward I. is proved
to be a forgery by means of dates. These show that
Alexander, on 16th October, offered his homage, not
for Scotland but for lands in England, and that
Edward deferred the ceremony. The memorandum
about 29th September must have been inserted later,
fraudulently and incautiously.

Whether part of the famous casket Letter, No.
II., ascribed to Queen Mary, is forged or not, I am
unable to decide. It has all the air of being copied
from a different document, not by Mary, but by
Thomas Crawford, a retainer of Darnley. It is cer-
tain, however, that when Mary was a prisoner of
Elizabeth, Wharton, an English official in the north,
suggested to his Government that letters of the
Queen of Scots should be forged and circulated, to
her disadvantage. Certainly all parties were unscru-
pulous about forgery, and I fear that Mary of Guise
was involved in the forgery of a letter of the Duke of
Chatelherault to the King of France. The Parnell
forgeries may not yet be forgotten ; they were poorly
executed and should not have taken in The Times.

We are not quite so easily beguiled as our an-
cestors. Psalmanazar, in Mr. Farrer’s fifth chapter,
would have less success than the egregious Rouge-
INTRODUCTION xvii

mont. It is generally thought that Rougemont de-
ceived the British Association, but as far as I know
they only gave hima hearing. Simple as I sit here, I
could not have accepted Rougemont’s absurd descrip-
tions of the life of Australian aborigines, Psal-
manazar’s story of the sacrifice of 20,000 children
yearly is more hard of belief than even the learned
theory that, in times past, a fresh king was sacrificed
yearly. As to Lauder, his forgeries were clever
enough, and safe enough as long as nobody took the
trouble to verify his references. In the long run,
somebody was sure to do so. I cannot but suspect
that the usual account of Lauder’s age is erroneous.
If it is correct his existence is a blank till he was
over fifty, and his forgeries are the work of a man
of seventy. Seventy is a late age for entering on a
career of fraud. One of the forged Scott novels takes
for granted that Sir Walter would introduce into the
Rising of 1745 a Countess whose family name is
MacMaggy. Noteven an Englishman could invent
a Gaelic name like MacMaggy: it surpasses the
MacCumnor of Dumas, and must be the invention of
a Frenchman.

Mr. Farrer, in a manner unpopular, but scientific,
leaves some of his mysteries unsolved. The case of
Simonides is the most puzzling of any, and

The tender-hearted scrolls
Of pure Simonides
xviii INTRODUCTION

seem to clamour for a fresh examination. We now
possess many Greek papyri, certainly authentic, of
an early date. These were unknown when Simonides
produced his early Greek papyri, and perhaps they
may repay inspection.

The probable forgery which puzzles me most is
the Vestiarium Scoticum, a magnificent volume, pur-
porting to date from about 1570-1580, and giving
the tartans of the Lowland as well as of the Highland
clans. Nowit is most improbable that even Highland
clans had regular stereotyped distinctive tartans in
the sixteenth century, while of Lowland tartans, as of
Scott and Ker, no mortal ever heard, outside of the
Vestiarium.

The manuscript first comes to notice in 1825.
Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote concerning it to Sir
Walter Scott, who turned a sceptical ear. The
owner was the father of these two enigmatic men,
the “ Sobieski Stuarts,” claiming to be the grandsons
of Prince Charles Edward, through his lawfully be-
gotten son, their father.

Now both Charles and his wife, Louise of Stol-
berg, denied that there ever was a child by them
begotten. The father of the two pretenders was
only known in authoritative records as Lieutenant
Thomas Allen, R.N., the second son of Captain, later
Admiral, R.N.

The two young men averred that their father
INTRODUCTION xix

possessed, through Prince Charles, a manuscript
sixteenth century copy of the Vestarium on vellum,
with domestic notes on the fly leaves, written by
Queen Mary’s Bishop, Lesley, the historian, Bishop
of Ross, about his own health. I have seen letters
in the hand of Thomas Allen, referring to this
copy on vellum. He signs “Mac Garadh,” which
he took to be the Gaelic form of the surname
‘“Hay”. There seems to have been some con-
nexion, real or supposed, between these Allens
and the Earls of Errol, and, in 1822, the eldest
Sobieski Stuart signs his volume of poems “John
flay Allen”.

How the Errol pretensions were to be reconciled
with the Stuart pretensions nobody can explain.
However, the letters of the paternal Mac Garadh
do certainly seem to testify to his possession of the
Vestcartum on vellum, and, as far as I can judge,
these letters are really in the hand of the old gentle-
man. Eccentric as his sons were, I do not suspect
them of forging their father’s letters, or suppose that
they had the necessary skill, if they had been wickedly
inclined. Yet no witness, to my knowledge, has seen
the manuscript on vellum. Meanwhile the brothers
had another copy, an eighteenth century copy on
paper, acquired from an old Highlander, residing in
the Cowgate, a teacher of the broad-sword exercise.
This copy is extant, and has been tested, as regards
XX INTRODUCTION

the quality of the ink, the age of the paper, the nature
of the handwriting, and so far, I am given to under-
stand that no fault can be found in it—yet the con-
tents, as concerns the Lowland tartans, have no known
corroboration in history or inart. Further, I have had
opportunities of studying the works and ways of the
two brothers calling themselves ‘“ Sobieski Stuarts,”
and it appears to me quite certain that they could
not have written the sixteenth century Scots of the
Vestiarium Scottcum—the necessary learning was not
within their powers. One of them made a kind of
copy of the MS., with amusing caricatures in red
ink, which I have seen ; this copy, of course, made
no pretensions to antiquity.

Thus, to the best of my memory, the question
of the Vestzartum stands, and a more inextricable
puzzle in the way of documents I cannot imagine.
What is this eighteenth century manuscript? What
had any mortal to gain by such a minutely skilled
and elaborate forgery? It did not pretend to be
in any way a proof of the Stuart pretensions of the
brothers, yet its contents have no shadow, to my
knowledge, of historical corroboration. (There is an
account of this mystery in Old and Rare Scottish
Tartans, by Mr. D. W. Stewart, 1893. I have not
a copy of the book at hand, but Mr, Stewart I think
was as much perplexed as myself.)

Mr. Farrer kindly refers to such slight assistance
INTRODUCTION xxi

as I was able (in the absence of Professor Child’s
monumental edition of Exglish and Scottish Popular
Ballads) to give him in the matter of ballad forgeries.
In the text is discussed the authenticity of the ballad
of Auld Maztland, which, in his great edition of
Ballads, Professor Child omitted, as a modern forgery.
For the reasons given in the text, I am personally
convinced that the Ettrick Shepherd was not the
forger, and no other modern artist can be, or has
been, suggested as the sinner. The Ballad, like
The Outlaw Murray, does not appear to have been
found outside of Ettrick and Yarrow. I have some-
times felt disposed to believe that both ballads are
literary imitations, earlier than the eighteenth cen-
tury, by members of the families of Lethington
and Philiphaugh. The Maitlands, from the days of
Tom Maitland who “faked” the pamphlet about the
Regent Murray and his supporters, were an accom-
plished set of men of letters. The revelations about
Knox and Murray are the one amusing political squib
of the Scottish Reformation. By Knox and his
friends the joke was not perceived, and, if Thomas
Maitland was not guilty, they suspected Satan him-
self of the authorship,

Really old ballads, transmitted long through oral
recitation, exist in many variants. Reciters, perhaps
themselves ‘“ makers,” have added, altered, omitted,
to their taste. Sir Walter Scott was the last of the
xxii INTRODUCTION

‘“‘makers,” and, in editing Zhe Border Munstrelsy,
he used the privilege of the old reciters: he inter-
polated and improved upon the versions which
reached him through oral tradition, or in copies
often imperfect.

We have an Otterburn ballad from a manuscript
in the British Museum which Professor Child dates
about 1550. It is an English version. It opens
in the same form as Herd’s version, published in
1776, but differs otherwise greatly, and does not
contain the words of the dying Douglas :—

Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And bury me at the braken bush,
That stands upon yon lily lee.
Later, Sir Hugh Montgomery, to whom Douglas

spoke, vanquishes Percy, and says :—

O yield thee to yon braken bush
That grows upon yon lily lee.

Herd’s version, imperfect in a stanza, is not sus-
pected of containing literary interpolations. James
Hogg obtained recitations of the ballad partly in
“plain prose,” and lent Scott his version, Douglas
speaks :—

My wound is deep, I fain would sleep,
Nae mair I’ll fighting see,

Gae lay me in the bracken bush
That grows in yonder lily lee.

This, of course, is practically Herd’s version, and
is under no suspicion, save for the first line, “ My
INTRODUCTION xxiii

wound is deep, I fain would sleep”. That line may
be by James Hogg. Scott, in the Mznstrelsy,
adopts it, but, in place of Hogg’s “Nae mair I'll
fighting see,” gives Herd’s ‘Take thou the van-
guard of the three,” with the rest of Herd’s verse.
The verse was a great favourite of Sir Walter's: he
quoted it to Lockhart when lying on what he believed
to be his deathbed. The verse is not Scott's; save
for the first line it is really traditional. Hogg goes
on :—
But tell na ane of my brave men
That I lie bleeding wan,
But let the name of Douglas still
Be shouted in the van.
This verse in the Mznstredsy Scott omits: it is
clearly by Hogg. The Shepherd continues in a far
better strain ; his Douglas goes on :—

And bury me here on this lee
Beneath the blooming brier,
And never let a mortal ken
A kindly Scot lyes here.

He liftet up that noble lord
Wi’ the saut tear in his e’e,
And hid him in the bracken bush,
On yonder lily lee.

Herd has nothing corresponding to this, for Herd’s
version does not contain the execution by Mont-
gomery of Douglas’s last command. The memory
of Herd’s informant may have failed him, for, on

the principles of early poetry, even of the Homeric
é
XXIV INTRODUCTION

epics, we ought to be told that the orders of Douglas
were obeyed. Hogg’s reciters may have supplied
his version, Scott prints, with slight verbal altera-
tions, this part of Hogg’s version. He thus omits
a verse clearly by Hogg himself ; improves, by aid of
Hogg, a verse of Herd’s traditional text ; and slightly
improves two verses of Hogg’s version which may
possibly enough be traditional.

In Kinmont Wille Scott has been suspected
of making the whole ballad. His source is not re-
corded: he says that ‘it has been much mangled
by reciters,” and that ‘‘some conjectural emenda-
tions were absolutely necessary in order to render it
intelligible”. Apparently his MSS. yield no trace of
the ballad as received from reciters. That there
really was a ballad appears, I think, from remini-
scences of it to be found in Scott of Satchells’
rhyming A7zstory (1638). Certainly, too, Sir Walter
never composed ¢zs stanza :—

He has called him forty marchmen bauld,
I trow they were of his ain name,
Except Sir Gilbert Elliot, called
The Laird of Stobs, 7 mean the same.

Again :—
*Twas wind and weet and snaw and sleet

is a regular ballad formula, occurring in Herd’s Sir
Patrick Spence. If Scott, as Professor Child suspects,
wrote verse 31, then he took the idea from Satchells,
INTRODUCTION XXV

whereas Satchells more probably took it from the
ballad. But we may suspect Scott's hand in the
ringing stanzas 9-12, on his chief, Buccleuch.

In short, when editing Zhe Border Minstrelsy,
Scott did not, in the scientific manner, give his ver-
sions with textual accuracy, but, as a minstrel him-
self, used the privilege of all previous reciters. That
he actually perverted the Elliot into the Scott version
of Jamie Telfer, 1 do not believe, but he imparted
poetic merit to his text. Opposite

The Dinlay snaw was ne’er mair white
Than the lyart locks o’ Harden’s hair,

I wrote, long ago, Aut Jacobus Hogg aut Diabolus.
But certainly it was not Hogg who wrote these
lines : it was Sir Walter. The original balladist must
have lived, to use a Hibernianism, long after the
events recorded in /amze Telfer—tfor these events
never occurred. What did occur, and lent a basis
to the ballad, we learn from the despatches of the
English officials on the Border in 1596.

I missed my chance asa ballad forger. I was work-
ing at MSS, in Abbotsford, when the ballad MSS.
were being copied for Professor Child. By engag-
ing an expert I might have had The Young Ruthven
and Simmy o Whythaugh (mea carmina) copied in
an old hand on old paper, and thrust into the mass.
Then we should have seen whether or not Professor
Child could be taken in by a modern ballad forgery.
XXVi INTRODUCTION

Recipe to forge a Border Ballad.

Take The Border Papers, edited by Joseph Bain
(1890). Select a good rousing incident, say the
slaying of Ridley, at the Newcastle football match
(May, 1599). Write it with as many rhymes in e
as possible. Avoid profusion of obsolete words.
Carefully abstain from dropping into poetry. Add
a few anachronisms, and distort historical facts to
taste ; employ regular ballad formule sparingly and
with caution, strain off, dish, and serve up with
historical notes, adding to taste fables about your
source @ fa Surtees. Remember that nothing can
be less like an old ballad than the ballads of Mr.
D. G. Rossetti.

A. LANG.
CHAPTER I.
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES.

THE practice of writing under the shelter of dis-
tinguished names flourished in Greece long even
before the zeal of the Ptolemies for their libraries
gave it a further stimulus, by the temptation of the
good prices they offered for the works of good
authors. And further confusion was imported into
literature by the custom, in the schools of the
sophists, of writing exercises on the imaginary
speeches or letters of persons of celebrity: some
of which came in time to pass as original works.
It was probably in this way that there came to
be composed those Letters of Euripides, of Themis-
tocles, of Socrates, of which Bentley exposed the
falsity when he intervened in the literary controversy
that raged at the close of the seventeenth century
regarding the relative merits of the learning of
the ancient and the modern world. But especially
successful was he in demonstrating such an origin
for the once famous Letters of Phalaris. For how
could Phalaris, assuming him to have lived in the

sixth century B.c., have committed himself to sundry
I
2 LITERARY FORGERIES

allusions which could only have been possible some
centuries later? Anachronisms are the rock on
which counterfeit works always run most risk of
shipwreck, and it was on this rock that these famous
Letters of the famous tyrant ultimately perished.

The celebrated controversy which proved thus
fatal to the Le¢ters is described at length in Bishop
Monk’s Life of Bentley (i., 58-138), and a wonder-
ful controversy it was, leading incidentally to Swift's
“‘Digression Concerning Critics” in the Zale of a
Tub, and to the “Battle of the Books” (1698).
Bentley's overwhelming learning gave him ulti-
mately an easy victory over Charles Boyle and his
Christ Church friends; but now that the dust of the
personal quarrel has long been laid to rest, it has
to be admitted that Boyle, whose edition of the
Letters in 1697 gave rise to the controversy, though
he believed the Letters to be authentic, anticipated
Bentley by alluding in his Preface to one point which
excited his suspicions of the contrary. He edited
them rather as an admirer of their quality than as
an out-and-out believer in their genuineness.

A word too may fairly be said on behalf of Sir
W. Temple, who, as a champion of the ancients
against the moderns, had contended that the oldest
books extant were the best of their kind, instancing
unfortunately Phalaris and AZsop: the comparative
modernity of whom Bentley had little difficulty in
establishing. Temple not only thought the Letters
authentic from the internal evidence, but esteemed
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 3

them to have “more grace, more spirit, more force of
wit and genius, than any others” he had ever seen,
either ancient or modern. Bentley on the contrary
regarded them as a mere ‘‘fardel of common-places,
without any life from action or circumstance,” and
complained of their emptiness and deadness, of their
stiffness and operoseness of style. This is to be
regretted, as Bentley’s verdict has killed the Letters
for all practical purposes. The last English trans-
lation of them was Thomas Francklin’s in 1749, and
they well deserved translation. For though they
may not have the merit of Cicero’s, as Bentley said,
yet many of them are of uncommon merit. A few to
Phalaris’ wife Erythia, to his son Paurolas, the letter
to the Himerzeans about the poet Stesichorus (54),
that to Hegesippus on the vanity of public opinion
(77), and many others, have in them all the qualities
Sir W. Temple affirmed. They might well form
part of general classical education, though whether
Phalaris was really the affectionate husband, the wise
father, the reluctant tyrant, the firm but merciful
ruler, the cynical but sensible correspondent, which
the Letéers portray, may well be left among the
questions that lie beyond the boundaries of our
existing knowledge.

Bentley's criticism was not more fatal to the
Letters of Phalaris than it was to the fables of AZsop.
Yet though all the world knows that the present
collection was composed by the Greek poet Babrius,

whose age is unknown, and transferred into our present
I *
4 LITERARY FORGERIES

prose edition by Maximus Palanudes in the four-
teenth century, AEsop still holds his rightful place in
every school or nursery of the civilised world. There
is no reason therefore in the nature of things why Phal-
aris should be so rigidly excluded.

The actual author of the Letters of Phalarzs lies
beyond the reach of probable discovery. And the
same is true of many similar compositions that throng
the classical library. Bentley never fulfilled his in-
tention of demonstrating the falsity of the Letters
of Democritus, Heraclitus, or Diogenes, which are
contained in the little volume that also has those of
Euripides, but it is doubtless with justice that they
are consigned to one common grave of oblivion. The
sixty-five letters of Diodorus Siculus, which first
startled the world in 1639, being first printed in
Carrera’s Memorte ai Catania, belong to the same
category. Nor is it ever likely to be known who
wrote the Querolus or Aulularia of Plautus, the
Rhesus of Euripides, or the works which tried to
smuggle themselves into notice under such famous
names as those of Plato, Aristotle, and other celeb-
rities.

Some of such works had perhaps at first no
‘ intention of deception, but were mere intellectual
exercises which came from their excellence to pass
as the original works of the authors they imitated :
but the genesis of most lay probably in the quest of
lucre. In either case the wealth of ability displayed
in their production is amazing, and prevents one from
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 5

rejecting as in the nature of things impossible the
contention of the Jesuit Hardouin that most of our
classical books are monkish forgeries. There are
other objections to this conclusion, but no valid
objection can be based on the lack of the requisite
ability to produce them.

It is, however, only where these classical forgeries
are associated with definite names, and assume there-
by a kind of personality, that they become of any
living interest ; and it is only for these, or the most
conspicuous of them, that it is here proposed to claim
some brief attention. It is curious that the classical
writers who have exercised most fascination for the
skill of imitators should be Cicero and Petronius
Arbiter.

1. Ofall the works which the critics have succeeded
in condemning to the long catalogue of supposititious
works by distinguished writers, none is more remark-
able than the so-called Cozsolatzo of Cicero; which
first saw the light at Venice early in the year 1583,
unheralded by a word of explanation regarding its
source, and without any hint of a manuscript to sup-
port it.

It was known from Cicero’s own allusions to the
work, and to fragments of it preserved in Lactantius,
that, in order to allay in some measure his boundless
grief at the loss of his daughter Tullia, Cicero had
composed a work of self-consolation, wherein he had
condensed all that philosophy could contribute in
diminution of his, distress. The printed work so
6 LITERARY FORGERIES

nearly approached Cicero in the nobility of its wisdom
and the splendour of its language that many at the
time accepted it as genuine. It combines the pes-
simism of Schopenhauer about man’s present life
with the hopefulness of St. Paul about his future one,
and is as well worth reading as many of Cicero’s un-
doubted works. It is to be regretted that to English
readers it is still only accessible in Thomas Blacklock’s
translation, entitled Paraclests, published in 1767,
and not very easy to procure.

The book was hardly out before it roused the
suspicions of the learned, Antonius Riccobonus, a
professor at Padua, was first in the field with a short
criticism published in the May of the same year. At
a time when imitation of classical authors was more
common than it is now, he declared for imitation.
Certain passages, he contended, were imitated
directly from similar passages in the Zusculan Dis-
putations, but expressed in poorer Latin: whilst

cc

several words such as “osor” for “qui odit” were
declared to be foreign to Cicero’s style, and the
violation of the Ciceronian rule against a word
beginning with N following the word “cum” was
pronounced to be a fatal flaw to the title of the
new claimant to classical honours.

Thereupon Franciscus Vianelli, who had pub-
lished the Cozsolatzo, wrote to Carlo Sigonio for his
opinion. Sigonio distanced all his contemporaries in
learning, being then in his fifty-ninth year, and des-
tined to die the year following (1584). In addition
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 7

to his work as professor at different times at Venice,
Padua and Bologna, Sigonio had found time to write
in irreproachable Latin historical and other works
which fill six large folio volumes.

Sigonio accordingly took up the challenge of his
former pupil Riccobonus, and in two famous Oratzons
answered all Riccobonus’ objections, and successfully
disposed of many of them. He tells how on first
receiving the work as a gift he regarded it with his
customary suspicion, but how on reading it to many
listeners he had come round to a contrary opinion,
and to a belief that none other than Cicero could
have written it (a xemzne alto quam a Tutho scribi
dutgue potursse). If a passage here and there had
been added to the text or had been badly expressed,
he deprecated on that ground the rejection of the
whole work; and he asked, if Cicero had'not written
it, what living man could have done so in that age.

To this Riccobonus replied in another and ampli-
fied criticism, and hazarded the bold conjecture that
Sigonio alone of living men had the ability to write
like Cicero. Herein he guessed aright, though it was
not proved for about 200 years. Muratori, in his life
of Sigonio, says that he wrote a third oration against
his hostile critics, Riccobonus, Gulielmus and Lipsius,
and that this treatise, taken to Vianelli to publish, did
not appear till 1599, owing to the publisher’s wish not
to offend Riccobonus, who died in that year. This
further defence is probably the treatise called Accu-
sator in the sixth volume of Sigonio’s works : wherein
8 LITERARY FORGERIES

he marshals the arguments for and against Cicero in
a dialogue between an assailant and a defender of his
authorship.

In sending his Ovations to Vianelli at his request,
Sigonio pressed Vianelli to disclose the source of the
Consolatio, and he closed his Accusator by the most
explicit disclaimer of his own composition of it:
“This book I neither wrote, nor published, nor did
I instigate any one to publish it”. His friend,
Antonius Gigantus, the poet, pressed him in vain
to acknowledge his authorship, and when he and
another after Sigonio’s death ransacked his papers,
they failed to find the least shred of paper or note
bearing on the production of the work.

Sigonio’s defence of Cicero was so skilful that
many writers hesitated to commit themselves to a
belief in Sigonio’s authorship. Amongst these was
Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian literature. But
at last (about 1785) he stumbled upon some original
letters from Sigonio to his friend Cammillo Coccupani
at Modena, and amongst them was one dated 12th
November, 1582, in which Sigonio begged his friend
to ask a certain lady whether she had received a letter
from him ‘ with a book of mine, de Consolatione, which
I wrote for her to show to yourself, desiring to have
your opinion about it” (Led¢¢. [tal., i., 315, 1787).

‘Certainly if Sigonio sent his Consolatio to a lady
to show to a third person, there cannot have been
at first much intention of concealment. The con-
jecture seems therefore plausible that some friend
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 9

induced him to publish it as Cicero’s to see how it
would fare at the hands of the learned. At all events
Sigonio died without manifesting the smallest desire
to undeceive the world about it.

Sigonio’s method of construction was most in-
genious. A certain passage in Petrarch’s Lefteve
Sentlt (x., 4), in which the poet seeks to console a
friend on the loss of a son and grandson, ran as
follows :—

“Cum virum tum precipue senem flere mortalia
turpe est, quem tempore et casuum observatione
similium contra omnes insultus odduruzsse (utor peculi-
aribus meis ac Tullii verbis) atque occa//uzsse con-
veniat.”

Petrarch must have found these two words in
some passage of Cicero now lost to us. Sigonio
supplied such a passage as follows :—

‘““Nemo suorum funera experitur, cui non adversa
multa antea contigerint : cur igitur graviora, vel certe
zeque gravia fortiter passus, cum maxime occadluzsse,
et ad dolorem novum odduruzsse deberet, despondeat
animum, seque moerori tradat?”

Sigonio must have composed these words deliber-
ately in order to adapt them to Petrarch’s sentiment
and to supply the original source ‘of his use of the
two rare Ciceronian words.

Sigonio in his defence suggested that Petrarch
might at some time have seen the Coxsodatzo of Cicero.
But unfortunately for this contention Petrarch, who
had been the fortunate discoverer of so many of
10 LITERARY FORGERIES

Cicero’s lost works, had never found the Cozsolatzo,
for in a letter written in the last year of his life (1374)
to Luca della Penna he expressly mentions the
Consolatto as one of the lost works of Cicero for
which he had searched in vain (42brum de Consola-
ttone Guest anxie nec invent ).

2. A less successful attempt than that of Sigonio
was made to pass as Cicero by some one who pub-
lished at Bologna in 1811 a fourth book of the De
Natura Deorum, taking up the subject from the
point where the third genuine book had ended. Two
years later this work of forty-six pages was reprinted
at Oxford by Lunn for the satisfaction of public
curiosity, not from any belief that it was other than
a forgery.

This little work purported to be edited from a
very ancient parchment manuscript. P. Seraphinus,
Ord. Fr. Min., professed to have found it in a certain
shop among sundry books bought at an auction, and
to have been allowed to take away the torn and worm-
eaten document. He had resolved to print it in
order to show the similarity of its doctrines to those
of the Catholic Church ; the editor being convinced
that, had Cicero been born in the Christian era, he
would have conformed to the orthodox faith. And
lest any one should think that Seraphinus himself
had composed the work, he swore most solemnly by
St. Francis d’Assisi that of such a composition he
was quite incapable: which may have been true as
regarded a friar of wholly fictitious existence,
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES II

But the writer went too far with his Christianity
of Cicero, nor could the undoubted cleverness of his
production save a work which put into the mouth of
Cicero expressions that presupposed a knowledge of
St. Paul. Not only is Cicero made to use a word so
foreign to his style or his time as the word relzgzo-
' setas for “‘a sense of religion,” but he is made to apply
to the Athenians the epithet St. Paul applied to them
(SerowSatpovéoraror), “too much given to religion”.
He speaks of “revelation” (vevedatzo) and “ the infal-
lible rule of faith,” like any Christian, and indulges in
utterances so remarkable as :-—

“There is no salvation (saéws) save in the com-
munion with the universality of the saints, save in the
common family of the faithful” (/idez addzctorum)
(c. 52).

Or again he speaks of it as the first principle of
religion “to acquiesce in those things, to approve
and to conform to that which has been believed
always, and in all places, and by all men, or at least
by most” (c. 13).

And finally Cicero deduces a universal terrestrial
monarchy from the celestial, and asks, as an advo-
cate for the temporal power of the Pope, ‘To what
other seat save that of Rome could that supreme
pontificate more fitly appertain?”

In his quite ultramontane Christianity he even
anticipates the Pope’s infallibility : “‘ By the common
consent of all men the supreme Roman Pope (fontz-
ex) of Rome is of right the sovereign in matters of
12 LITERARY FORGERIES

religion . . . who cannot be wrong or err in anything
pertaining to religion”.

This is all ridiculous enough, good and Ciceronian
as was the Latin in which this hoax was perpetrated.
The motive and the personality of the perpetrator _
are alike obscure. At one time it was attributed to
Philipp Marheinecke or to De Wette, both Protestant
theologians; but subsequently these writers were
acquitted, and the blame has since oscillated between
Cludius and Buckholz (Gresse’s Tresor des Livres
Rares, ii, 172). By Cludius of Heidelberg must be
meant Hermann Heimart Cludius of Hildesheim,
born in 1754, and for fifty years (1787 to 1827)
superintendent of the Church of St. George’s at Hil-
desheim. Wolff’s Encyclopedia attributes to him the
composition of fourteen works, poetical, philosophical
and theological; but neither his works, his profes-
sion, nor his position seem easily consistent with his
composition of a forgery. Whether there is any
better reason to connect Buckholz with the work is
not apparent, and it must remain a mystery for what
reason common conjecture pitched upon Protestant
theologians as the likeliest authors of a work that
sought to identify Cicero with the tenets of ultra-
montane Catholicism.

3. The history of literature is strewn with the
reputations of the learned, who have either wrongly
doubted or wrongly believed. And often no decisive
victory has declared itself for either combatant, and
legitimate doubt has survived an accepted armistice.
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 13

This is well illustrated by the case of the Trau
fragment of the famous Sazyrzcon, ascribed to Pe-
tronius, the friend, the minister, and finally the victim
of Nero. :

The first printed edition of Petronius appeared
in Venice in 1499, and consisted of only thirty-eight
pages. With this sorry and almost sole remnant of
Roman fiction the world had to content itself for
about a century and a half, although quotations from
it in the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury, the
English Bishop of Chartres, proved a knowledge of
a more complete work existent in the twelfth century.

Then came a find, round which still hangs con-
siderable mystery. In a library said to belong to
Nicholas Cippicus at Trau, in Dalmatia, in a volume
containing also manuscript copies of Catullus, Tibul-
lus and Propertius, was discovered by Marinus
Statileus, on his return from the completion of his
law studies at Padua, that additional episode in the
Petronian story which is known as the “ Supper of
Trimalchio,” referred to by John of Salisbury.

The fullest contemporary account of this find is
that given by John Lucius in his Memorze [storiche
at Tragurio (Trau) in 1674. Statileus brought the
manuscript he had found to Lucius, himself a native
of Trau, and Lucius urged him to print it just as it
was ‘for the honour of the country” (fer decoro
della patria). But he could not prevail, and, leaving
Trau in 1654, Lucius told certain learned men in
Padua and Rome of the discovery, and vainly
14 LITERARY FORGERIES

exhorted Statileus and Cippicus to have it printed
(531).

This proves that the manuscript was found some
time before 1654, a much earlier date than is usually
supposed. And it must have been discovered much
earlier still, for Dr. Spon found Statileus a man
of nearly sixty in 1675. It was between 1639 and
1645 that Statileus can be proved to have been at
Padua, so that he must have found the manuscript
about the year 1645, which would leave some twenty
years between its discovery and its first printed ap-
pearance in 1664. This is highly incredible, and
even ten years is a long time to allow for the con-
quest by Lucius of the modesty or the indolence of
his friend and relative Statileus.

The licence to publish the discovery is dated
2nd December, 1663, at Padua, and in the year follow-
ing it was published both at Padua and at Paris, the
same preface being prefixed to both editions, This
preface gives the story of Statileus finding it in the
Cippican Library, and of his taking counsel about it
with the learned men of Venice and Holland and
more especially with John Rhodius, who died at
Rome in 1659. Statileus here takes the place sub-
sequently claimed by Lucius himself in the matter of
consulting the learned world. Statileus, after pres-
sure from the Venetian ambassador at Rome, had
readily agreed to send a copy of the manuscript to
Rome for examination, after which Frambotti at
Padua, having obtained it from Statileus, offered it
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES Is

to the perusal of the public in the exact form in
which he had received it from Statileus (mwdum et
quale ab codem impetratum accepimus).

This edition, though it had been thus submitted
to the approval of the learned (doctessemz cujusgue in
urbe censure subjectus liber), was full of the most
astounding words and phrases. And in March, 1665,
the erudite Frenchman, Adrian de Valois, boldly
declared that every page of it bore palpable marks
of forgery and imposture. Such monstrous words
abounded in it that, if Petronius wrote them, Petronius
must have been ignorant of Latin. Genders, cases
and declensions were all hopelessly wrong, and the
incidents of the feast clashed at many points with
Roman customs. It was to be rejected as wholly
ridiculous.

It was a strong case that he made. And he was
supported by a younger critic, a German, called
Wagenseil, who unhesitatingly pronounced it a for-
gery. Many of its words were more than barbarous ;
they were not even human. The work was clearly
a very recent abortion by some miserable man (zzep¢z
alicujus homuncionts), and he would fain whisper to
Statileus that he was himself the man, and that he
would do wisely to make a clean breast of it.

A vigorous reply to these critics appeared forth-
with, called the Responszo (1666). It professed
to be by Marinus Statileus of Trau, a jurisconsult,
and many bad points made by Wagenseil it answered
completely. But though contemporaries accepted it
16 LITERARY FORGERIES

as by Statileus, it was only written for Statileus, not
dy him, as was pretended, nor is it certain by whom
it was written. Lucius some years later said that he
was told by Michel Antonius Baudrand of Paris that
the famous Dr. Peter Petit of Paris, whom Lucius had
known at Rome, was its real composer (MJemozrs of
Trau, p. 532); and it may be that this suggestion is
the source of the ascription of the Aesponszo to Petit
by his friend the Abbé Nicaise in the long list of
that versatile writer's works in his Zpzstola de obztu
Petri Petite (in 1698). Petit therefore may have
written it, but there is no clear proof, and the tradi-
tion that he did write it is probably responsible for
the erroneous statement by many subsequent writers
that Petit was the actual discoverer of the manuscript.

At all events the dispute about its authenticity
led at last to the sending of the actual manuscript to
Rome, where in August, 1668, a meeting of experts is
said to have assigned it, from: the similarity of the
writing and paper to those of an original work of
Petrarch, an antiquity of 300 years (Goujet, 82d.
Franc., i., 212). Their verdict may be read at length
in Lucius’ Memotrs of Trau (533), copied verbatim
from the Gzornale det Letteratz for 27th August, 1668:
an ecclesiastical periodical which unfortunately omits
to give us the names of the experts.

In November of that same year we find a letter
from Lucius to the brothers Blaeu, the publishers, at
Amsterdam (14th November, 1668), wherein he al-
ludes to his having often inspected and read the
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 17

manuscript at Trau (that is, before 1654); to his
having shown it to the brothers themselves when at
Rome; and to his efforts to overcome Statileus’ un-
accountable reluctance to publish the work. He
sends them a copy from which to print a fresh edition,
and at the same time he sends them a fresh defence
of it by Statileus. This defence must have been the
Apologia which was published in 1669; and which
purported, like the Aesfonszo, to be by Statileus,
being addressed by him facetiously to “the Conscript
Fathers of the Literary Commonwealth ”.

As the Responsio was attributed to Petit, it was
only natural that the Apologza should be attributed
to him also, though for this there is not even the
authority of Lucius, who most distinctly assigns it to
his friend, the Abbé Gradi, the librarian of the Vatican
(Memoirs of Trau, p. 535). Why he should do so
is not clear, seeing that he had himself sent it to the
Blaeu brothers as being the work of Statileus. And
here appears a remarkable thing: there is strong
internal evidence that Lucius had a hand in it him-
self. Adrian de Valois had spoken slightingly of
the town of Trau, and accordingly in reply to him
the author of the Apologia breaks out towards the
end into a long and rather irrelevant eulogy of this
place. Its antiquity is traced back to Dionysius of
Syracuse, 2,000 years before; the allusions to it by
Strabo and Polybius are referred to; and a summary
is given of its history. No Parisian, like Petit,

would have launched out into this eulogy of Trau,
2
18 LITERARY FORGERIES

nor have possessed the knowledge requisite for such
a task. It must have come from some native of
Trau, such as was Lucius himself. And if we turn
to the first book of his Memoirs of Trau we there
actually find in Italian precisely the same history of
Trau that we find in Latin in the Apologia; there
are the same allusions to Dionysius of Syracuse,
380 years B.c.; to Strabo and Polybius; the same
pride in the antiquity of Trau. But what is still
more remarkable, the Apologia ends its eulogy of
Trau by an allusion to its utter destruction by the
Saracens: a fact which is also told in the Memozrs,
but is there told as resting solely on the authority
of an Archdeacon Tregnano, a writer whom Lucius
had recovered from oblivion. Lucius, it is true, had
mentioned the fact in his book on the History of Dal-
matia, published in 1666, and as Gradi had himself
licensed this book on behalf of the Index he might in
this way have acquired the information ; but its more
probable connexion with Lucius is confirmed by the
very language of the two passages.

When therefore we find these facts: Lucius send-
ing the Apologia to the publishers as the work of
Statileus ; these publishers remaining in such ignor-
ance of the truth that in a second edition of it in
1671 they still refer to Statileus as its author; then
in 1674 Lucius openly assigning it to Gradi, who
was alive to contradict it; and the strong internal
evidence withal that no one but Lucius himself could
have written at least some part of it; suspicion can-
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 19

not but arise that Lucius had some motive for all
this mystification, and that some underground work
in connection with the “ Supper of Trimalchio” must
be divided between himself, Gradi, and Statileus or
Statilius. One is driven back to the suspicion, which
Wagenseil never surrendered, that after all the
“Supper of Trimalchio” may be a forgery.

But is not the manuscript its own evidence?
Is it not in the National Library at Paris (Lat.
7989), and did it not pass the close scrutiny of ex-
perts at Rome in 1668?

But was it ever said who these experts were?
Did they include Gradi and Lucius amongst them?
And how comes it that these experts ascribed it to
the age of Petrarch (who died 1374), when Dr. Spon
in 1675 found the date of 2zoth November, 1423,
inscribed on one of the pages? Either this addition
was made in the interval, or by a miraculous blind-
ness the experts overlooked it. But the addition
seems more probable than the blindness.

Dr. Spon found the manuscript in the library of
Marinus Statileus, who might, he thought, have told
him more about it but for some illness which then
affected him. Eleven years later the Pére Mabillon
saw the same manuscript at Modena in the library
of Laurence, the son of Marinus (Menagiana, iii.,
205, from Mabillon’s [ter [talicum, 202). But the
Pére Montfaucon, who actually bought it for France,
knows nothing of this sojourn at Modena. His

story is that, after the death of Statileus, it fell into
2 *
20 LITERARY FORGERIES

the hands of a Dalmatian who brought it to Rome
in the hope thereby to advance his fortunes. Being
disappointed in this, and in want of money, he pawned
it to Peter Paul Mariano, and, when he came to re-
pay the money, still left the Codex with Mariano.
The Abbé de Louvois would have bought it from
Mariano for the Royal Library, had not the price
asked for it brought the negotiation to an end. On
Mariano’s death Montfaucon, by the help of a friend,
bought it on reasonable terms from Mariano’s heirs
(Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum, ii., 758). So it found its
way to Paris.

Montfaucon twice gives the year 1703 as that in
which he bought the manuscript, but Menage, who
died in 1692, is made to speak of having seen it in the
Royal Library and to have recognised it as genuine
at least twelve years before it can have been there
at all (Menagiana, iii., 205)!

But doubtless the manuscript which Montfaucon
bought is the same which Spon saw in 1675. The
volume contains Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus and
“The Supper,” and Montfaucon vouches for all these
having been written by the same hand.

A later and better description of the Codex is
given in Beck's Manuscripts of the Satyricon (1863).
“The Supper” begins on page 206 of the small
leather-bound folio. The first three pages are much
paler than the rest; “they seem to have suffered
from exposure, rubbing, or other causes”. On page
209 is a change toa darker ink, to larger letters, and
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 21

to fewer lines to the page. Still Beck thought there
was the same handwriting throughout, though his
allusions to rubbings and to different inks do not
tend to allay suspicion, as these are not unknown as
among the indications of literary trickery.

With these suspicious antecedents literature be-
came possessed of that specimen of almost impossible
Latin, known as the “ Supper of Trimalchio”. That
John of Salisbury referred to this supper in his
Polycraticus (iv., 5, and viii., 7) does not of itself
prove the genuineness of the Trau fragment. In
any case that fragment left the Satyrzcon obviously
incomplete, and gave scope for further discoveries.
Nor was it long before another was made.

4. This was the discovery claimed by Francis
Nodot, who combined the profession of arms with no
small skill in letters. On 12th October, 1690, he wrote
an ecstatic letter to M. Charpentier, then Director of
the French Academy, announcing his discovery of
the remainder of Petronius. His story was that
after having heard from a German that a certain M.
Dupin, a French officer in the service of the Em-
peror of Austria in the campaign against Turkey,
had become possessed of such a manuscript at the
siege of Belgrade, he had succeeded by the help of a
Frankfurt merchant in obtaining from M. Dupin a
copy of the manuscript. No one but the shadowy
M. Dupin ever saw the manuscript, but the copy
was published at Rotterdam in 1693 as the complete
work of Petronius, the additional words and para-
22 LITERARY FORGERIES

graphs being printed in a different type from those
of the work as hitherto known, and every Latin page
being accompanied on the opposite one with a French
translation. The additional matter in prose and
verse did not amount to very much in quantity, but
the work speedily acquired popularity, and was trans-
lated into English in 1694, and again in 1708, and
this Jatter translation by Mr. Wilson and others of
the Middle Temple was reprinted verbatim in 1899
for private circulation only, but with no publisher’s
name on the title-page.

On 9th November, 1690, M. Charpentier con-
gratulated Nodot on his discovery, but a goodly
battle was in store also for this version of Petronius.
The critics, again repelled by many Gallic and bar-
barous words, took most offence at the use of the
word castedlum (translated into French as. chdteau),
for a ‘‘country house,” at a time long prior to the exist-
ence of such chéteaux. Many of the phrases in the
new fragments were shown to be taken from phrases
in the real Petronius, and many of the corrections
and conjectures of the commentators were found to be
embodied in the text of the new version. Also the
story of the smith who invented unbreakable glass
agreed verbally with John of Salisbury’s extract
from the ‘ Supper of Trimalchio,” instead of with the
abbreviated form of the same story as given in the
Trau fragment. Twelve Latin verses also came
straight from John of Salisbury, and there were
many indications of the whole work having been
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 23

pieced together from various sources with no small
expenditure of ingenuity. The best account of this
adverse criticism is that given by Gachet d’Artigny
in his Nouveaux Mémoires d’histowre (i., 346-76,
1749).

Bentley, in an odzter dzctum, alluded in 1697 to
Nodot’s version as a “bungling supplement,” and as
a “scandal toall forgeries”. And so the verdict has
remained, despite the Contre-Critiqgue which in 1700
Nodot published in defence of his Petronius, and
in which he successfully answered several of the
weaker objections of his adversaries. His appeal to
the case of the Trau fragment, which after similar
objections to those raised against his own version had
been passed as genuine by the critics, was not with-
out force; but in the case of his version he should
have remembered that no one but himself had ever
seen so much of the original as the alleged transcript
by the alleged M. Dupin. The Trau manuscript had
a real existence.

It would be natural to ascribe the deception in
this case to Nodot himself. But his belief in the
genuineness of his Petronius has little appearance of
simulation, and his anxiety to consult learned men
and academies about the merits of the work seems
an indication of his good faith in the matter. It is
also open to doubt whether he had the requisite
ability for the task of a forger. A contemporary,
who knew him in 1706 engaged at Lille in the pro-
visioning department of the army, described him to
24 LITERARY FORGERIES

Gachet d’Artigny as not at all the kind of man to be
capable of imitating Petronian Latin. To meet the
difficulty the suggestion was made by Petrequin that
the actual composition was the work of Linage de
Vauciennes, who is known to have translated the
Satyricon into French and to have filled the gaps
with his own invention, and that he was aided by
the notorious Nicholas Chorier, who perhaps lent it
to Nodot. Chorier died in 1692, and in this direction
may lie the solution of the puzzle. Quérard called it
an ingenious conjecture, and beyond that it seems
impossible to advance (Swperchertes Littératres, Pe-
tronius). |

5. The last attempt to hoax the world with Pe-
tronius was that of the Spaniard, Joseph Marchena,
who in 1800 published a fragment of Petronius
purporting to be extracted from a very ancient
manuscript found in the monastery of St. Gallen in
Switzerland, and accompanied by a French translation
and notes, by “ Lallemandus sacree theologiz doctor ”.
As a matter of fact the notes were the primary object of
the work, the text being produced afterwards asa peg
whereon to hang them. The text consisted of only a
few pages, but they were so deftly fitted in to the real
text of Petronius and so skilfully imitative of his style
that many learned men in Germany were deceived by
it. Marchena, who became a naturalised Frenchman
after fear of the Inquisition had driven him from Spain,
was secretary to General Moreau during his cam-
paign on the Rhine; and it seems to have been in
SOME CLASSICAL FORGERIES 25

answer to a sort of challenge from the general that
he attempted his task. He seems not to have in-
tended anything more than a hoax. But its success
led him later to pretend to having found among the
ruins of Herculaneum forty unpublished verses of
Catullus, though in this case the Germans had the
laugh at him. Marchena is described as a dwarf,
of deformed and repulsive appearance, who fancied
his attractions irresistible to the other sex, and who
ultimately died in great poverty. His “fragment”
is a terrible production, but it serves to illustrate the
possibility of so cleverly imitating ancient writers as
to deceive the very elect among the moderns. If
Petronius was so imitable in the nineteenth century,
why should he have been less so in the seventeenth?
CHAPTER II.
BERTRAM: “THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN”,

Few literary frauds have ever been committed more
extraordinary than that which the criticism of the
learned has, not without strong opposition, laid to
the charge of Charles Julius Bertram. For no reason-
able motive, pecuniary or other, has ever been or
can be assigned for his conduct, and at the best we
are asked to choose between vanity and insanity as
his guiding principle.

Bertram’s father was a silk dyer, who migrated
from England with his family to Copenhagen in
the year 1743, and the year following set up as a
hosier. Charles Julius, the son, born in 1723, must
have then been in his twenty-first year. In July,
1747, though belonging to the Anglican Church,
his petition to become a student at the university
was granted, and in that capacity he acquired the
friendship and patronage of Gramm, the privy-coun-
cillor and chief librarian to the King of Denmark.
Subsequently Bertram became Professor of English
in the Royal Marine Academy at Copenhagen, and

a Danish-English grammar is one among many
26
“THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN” 27

other testimonies to his industry and ability in the
field of learning.

In 1747 he began a correspondence with the
celebrated English antiquary, Dr. Stukeley, who
says: “In the summer of 1747, 11th June, whilst I
lived at Stamford, I received a letter from Charles
Julius Bertram, Professor of the English tongue in
the Royal Marine Academy of Copenhagen”. Inas-
much, however, as Bertram only became a student
in July of 1747, he cannot have been a professor in
the June of that year; and this has been urged
against him asa falsehood. But Stukeley nowhere
says that Bertram so described himself, and the
passage quoted may only refer to Bertram’s position
at that later date when Stukeley was narrating his
transactions with him.

A correspondence between Bertram and Stukeley
ensued, in the course of which Bertram referred to
a curious manuscript history of Roman Britain by
Richard of Westminster which he had seen in the
possession of a friend. Stukeley for some time
thought no more of the matter, but ended by writing
for an extract from the manuscript. An imitation
having been sent, and pronounced by the Keeper of
the Cotton Library to be 400 years old, Stukeley
became more interested, and begged Bertram, if he
could, to get possession of the manuscript; this
being with difficulty accomplished, he solicited a
transcript of the whole, and a copy of the map that
went with it. This transcript reached him in a
28 LITERARY FORGERIES

succession of letters, and Stukeley, deeming it “the
greatest treasure we could now boast of in this kind
of learning,” pressed Bertram to print it; a request
with which Bertram complied in 1757, when he
published his alleged discovery in the little volume
called Britannicarum Gentium Flistorie Antique
Scriptores tres: Ricardus Corinensis, Gildas Badon-
cus, Nenntus Banchorensis. The original title of
the single history was Azcard: monacht Westmonas-
tertensts commentariolum geographicum, de Situ Bre-
tanniea, et stationum guas im ea tnsula Romani
adipicaverunt.

It appears that there really was a monk of West-
minster between the years 1450 and 1472 called
Richard, but Stukeley insisted that this could not be
the Richard in question, and suggested that the real
writer was another monk of Westminster, the better
known Richard of Cirencester, who flourished a
century earlier.

To this suggestion of superior wisdom Bertram
bowed, speaking of his treatise as de/zeved to have
been written by Richard of Cirencester. Thereby
he exposed himself to needless difficulties, for the
frequent references to classical authors, which have
been urged as highly improbable in a monk of the
fourteenth century, would be less improbable in any
writer towards the end of the fifteenth. And the
faults of Latin and variations of words which dis-
tinguish the treatise from the sole surviving Latin
work of Richard of Cirencester could not have been
“THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN” 29

objected against a work by Richard of Westminster
who had left no such standard of literary comparison
behind him.

Stukeley’s reasons for ascribing the work to
Richard of Cirencester are quite insufficient and
fanciful. Richard of Cirencester had travelled much,
visited libraries, and written books ; therefore he, and
no later Richard, must have written the De Sztu.
Had Bertram not acceded to this bad logic, many of
the reasons for denouncing the De Sztu a forgery
would have been non-existent.

It is to be regretted that the letters about the
manuscript between Stukeley and Bertram, covering
a space of two years, are no longer available to shed |
light on the story. In 1847 Bertram’s letters to
Stukeley were in the possession of Mr. John Britton,
the antiquary, who intended at one time to present
them to the British Museum, but who unfortunately
never did so, though possibly they somewhere exist.
It is consequently impossible to judge of the amount
of discretion shown by Stukeley in his dealing with
Bertram.

It is common to write of Stukeley as a man of
vanity, and a ready dupe to any knave who came by.
But he appears to have acted with reasonable pru-
dence. It was not till 18th March, 1756, after a period
of nine years for correspondence, for conversation,
for consideration about the manuscript, that he read
before the Antiquarian Society his Account of Richard
of Crrencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his
30 LITERARY FORGERIES

Works: an account which he published the year
following (1757), when Bertram also published his
work, and which he dedicated to the President of the
Society, Lord Willoughby of Parham. With an air
of triumph at his good fortune in having saved “this
most invaluable work” of Richard of Cirencester,
Stukeley proceeds to relate all he had been able to
collect concerning that worthy, and in what manner
he had become acquainted with the work through
Bertram. He also tells us much about the map which
accompanied Richard’s treatise, and which he prefixed
to his published Account, and adds a transcript of the
curious I¢zzerary of Richard, and an alphabetical list
of the Roman names of places with his best con-
jectures as to their modern equivalents.

Much that Richard told of the ancient Britons,
of their manners and military institutions, and of the
Druids, was borrowed from Cesar, but it was the
new information contained in the book which chiefly
commended it to Stukeley. More than a hundred
names of cities, roads, and people were added to our
knowledge of Roman Britain; the province of Ves-
pasiana was added to the five previously known ; and
the Roman dominion was shown to have extended
as far as Inverness. Englishmen learnt with pride
how the natives of Surrey (the Senones) had crossed
the Alps under Brennus, and besieged and wasted
Rome. Though many of the journeys across Britain
coincided with those of Antoninus’ /¢zxerary, they
were not copied from that source, which Stukeley
“THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN” 31

vouched for it that Richard had never seen. Many
facts were also added to the history of Britain con-
cerning the expeditions of emperors and legates,
the taking of cities, the emigration to Ireland, the
building of the walls, and a persecution of the Chris-
tians which involved an increase of 17,000 to the
army of martyrs. And the whole was written “ with
great judgment, perspicuity, and conciseness, as by
one that was altogether master of his subject”. No
wonder that Stukeley was proud of his discovery,
which extended beyond all expectation the know-
ledge of the past history of his country. In a letter
to Dr. Mead (27th March, 1749) he terminated his
account of Richard by calling him “the Pausanias of
Britain”,

This interesting work of Richard or of Bertram
is best read, in English, in Giles’ Szx Old English
Chronicles (1848), or in its Latin original, in the
Description of Britain, published anonymously by
Hatcher, the historian of Salisbury, in 1809. The
work is a mosaic of information collected from Czesar,
Tacitus, Selinus, Camden, and other authorities, about
early Britain ; the author not concealing his indebted-
ness to these previous writers, but incorporating many
passages from them without any indication that such
passages were quotations. It is certain from Ber-
tram’s preface and notes to his Zves Scraptores that
he was well read in all that related to the antiquities
of Britain, and it must be supposed that he amused
his leisure by utilising his knowledge for the produc-
32 LITERARY FORGERIES

tion of his extremely clever compilation. In the
library of Corpus Christi College, at Cambridge,
there is a manuscript ascribed to Bede, which has
never been published, entitled ““De Situ Britannize
et de mirabilibus ejus”. It is curious that the former
part of the title should be identical with that of the
work ascribed to Richard. That Bertram knew of it
is evident from his suggestion in his preface that it
ought to be published, but it is fair to wonder how
he knew of it, and whether he had ever seen it.

The havoc that Bertram’s fraud (if such it was)
played with our history is difficult to realise. Though
some writers were doubtful or cautious about quoting
his authority, the majority reposed on him gladly.
Especially was this the case with county historians,
of whom a complete survey is given in Mr. Mayor’s
preface to his edition of Richard de Cirencester’s
Speculum F1rstorrale de gestis rerum Angle. For
example: “This valuable work and more valuable
map... containing the best and largest account of
Britannia Romana yet extant” (Hutchin’s “est. of
Dorset, i., 16).

‘That the work is genuine,” wrote the antiquary,
J. Whitaker, ‘“‘needs no proof. All the embodied
antiquarians of the fourteenth and three succeeding
centuries could not have forged so learned a detail of
Roman antiquities” (//zst. of Manchester, i., 54).
Many pages of this kind are quoted by Mr. Mayor.

Even the great Gibbon himself escaped not alto-
gether from Bertram; and readers of that immortal
“THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN” 33

historian must revise their idea of early Britain con-
tained in such a passage as the following: ‘‘ Under
the protection of the Romans ninety-two con-
siderable towns had arisen in the several parts of
that great province, and among these thirty-three
cities were distinguished among the rest by their
superior privileges and importance” (c. 31). This
and other details about the constitution of Roman
Britain Gibbon borrows entirely from Richard,
adding the remark that “although it may not seem
probable that he wrote from the MSS. of a Roman
general, he shows a genuine knowledge of antiquity
very extraordinary for a monk of the fourteenth
century ”.

It isnot too much to say that the pseudo- Richard
has entered deeply into the mental equipment of most
Englishmen, How could it be otherwise when from
such a source the Ordnance Survey derived the
names of Roman stations for its maps, and scholastic
geographical works borrowed from it with implicit
trust for the instruction of the young? It is im-
possible to gauge the influence which this probable
fiction still exercises indirectly on our notions of
England in Roman times.

From an early date many regarded the whole
composition as a hoax, but opinion oscillated fairly
evenly between belief and disbelief, till in 1845 Karl
Wex, a German writer, vigorously challenged its
authenticity, and turned the scale in favour of in-

credulity. He showed how the quotations from
3
34 LITERARY FORGERIES

Tacitus were taken from recent editions, which lay
obviously beyond the knowledge of any monks of
Westminster. For example, the oldest editions of
Tacitus in Agricola, 16, had the words coguzto pro-
vincie motu; the Venetian edition of 1497 had by
mistake co coguzto, which, as impossible, later editors
altered to co cognito. Richard too had eo cogutto.
But how or why in the fourteenth century? The
reply, that Bertram, in copying the MS., improved
on it by adopting these later readings, could hardly
be considered convincing.

Many other objections have been raised against
the manuscript. Its Latinity has been described by
Mr. Woodward as having ‘‘the flavour of a public
school exercise very badly done,” and it is very dis-
similar in vocabulary and phraseology to Richard
of Cirencester’s surviving and genuine work, the
Speculum FTrstoriale. It is, however, a curious co-
incidence that both the Speculum and the De Sztu
open with the same allusion to Britain having been
originally called Albion. The Speculum begins:
“Post primum insule Britanniz regem nomine Bru-
tum (a quo dicta insula gue preus Albion vocabatur) ”.
The De Sztu begins its second paragraph with: ‘ Ve-
teres Britanniam ab albis rupibus przmum A lbtonem,
postea vocabulo gentis suze Britanniam cognomi-
naverunt ”.

But more remarkable than this coincidence be-
tween the real and the alleged Richard is the following
coincidence between the supposed Richard and Ber-
“THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN” 35

tram. For Bertram in the preface to his publication
addressed his work “Candido et Benevolo lectori,”
an appeal to the ‘‘kind reader” which came naturally
enough from a writer in the eighteenth century. But
was such an appeal a common literary habit in the
fourteenth or fifteenth century? It is surely some-
thing more than a coincidence that the supposed monk
should, towards the close of his first book, commend
it to the “kind reader” (Benevolo lectori), precisely
as Bertram commended his book several centuries
later. Was not one and the same mind behind the
same phrase in each instance?

But the greatest difficulty about Bertram’s dis-
covery lay in the fact that the manuscript of Richard’s
De Situ had never been seen by any one. Stukeley,
in his correspondence with Bertram, expressed the
natural desire that, if possible, the manuscript original
should be purchased for the British Museum, but to
this suggestion Bertram would not listen. It was
suggested that Bertram’s friend, who was said to own
the MS., had been wild in his youth, and stolen the
document from a volume in some English library.
Not long after Bertram’s death in January, 1765, at
the age of forty-three, inquiries were made about the
MS., but Lord Spencer’s search for it at Copenhagen,
and all other efforts to find it proving unavailing, the
inference has been naturally drawn that its non-exist-
ence accounted for its non-discovery. The inference,
however, does not amount to proof, considering with

what facility a manuscript is lost or destroyed, and
3 *
36 LITERARY FORGERIES

also the fact that the MS., if it existed, never belonged
to Bertram.

A more convincing argument against the manu-
script lies in the small specimen of it which Bertram
sent to Stukeley and of which that antiquarian printed
a facsimile at the end of his Account of Richard.
It may also be seen in the frontispiece of Mr. Mayor’s
preface. It has been declared by Mr. Woodward,
the Librarian of Windsor Castle, to bear no resem-
blance to the handwriting of the fourteenth or indeed
of any century, “and to be plainly a clumsy forgery
by an unpractised hand, not a tracing or copy from
a genuine original”. Some of the letters have strange
unusual terminals, and others are dissimilar from those
in Richard’s genuine writing. But two curious facts
must be remembered about it: (1) that when Stuke-
ley showed it to his friend, Mr. Caseley, the Keeper
of the Cotton Library, that gentleman immediately
pronounced it to be 400 years old; (2) that about
the year 1840 Sir F. Madden in the manuscript de-
partment of the British Museum showed Mr, Wright
a facsimile of these same lines in a letter from Ber-
tram to Stukeley, and pointed out a number of minute
characteristics in the writing, which led him to be-
lieve it a genuine product of the fourteenth century.
At the same time Sir F. Madden animadverted on
the rashness of the Council of the Historical Society
in having decided to reject Richard from their series
of our early historians (Lzterary Gazette for 11th

July, 1846).
“THE PAUSANIAS OF BRITAIN” 37

There were few, if any, better palzeographists in
his time than Sir F. Madden, and, whether or not he
came to revise his opinion, the fact that he at one
time accepted this sample of the MS. as genuine
must in fairness be set against the judgment of Mr.
Woodward. Ifthe Keeper of the manuscript depart-
ment of the British Museum, and the Keeper of the
Cotton Library, could so easily be deceived by a
forgery, of what value is expert opinion? We are
left without a compass on a sea of doubt.

The balance of argument is against Bertram. But
the fact that his Itineraries supply some Roman roads
and stations, unrecorded by other writers, which have
been identified by modern antiquaries, can only be
accounted for at the expense either of the ability or
of the veracity of those antiquaries. Of the ability
and knowledge displayed by him there can be no
question. One is astonished that so much learning
and skill should have gone to a mere fabrication.
And if the object was the amusement of deceiving
Stukeley, the joke can have had little zest, seeing
that Stukeley went to his grave without a suspicion
of the deceit that had been practised on him. The
total absence for any assignable motive for a forgery
would, in default of counter reasons, supply a strong
argument in favour of Bertram. .

Nothing known of his life or character or company
would of itself lend any support to suspicion of his
literary honesty. During and after his connexion
with Stukeley he was occupied with works which
38 LITERARY FORGERIES

would seem to indicate a temperament far removed
from the disposition one would expect in a forger.
Two years after the announcement of his great
discovery we find him publishing an ssay on the
Excellency of the English Tongue (1749); then the
Rudimenta Grammatice Anglicane (1750) ; the next
year Ethics from various Authors (1751); two years
later his Royal Enghsh-Danish Grammar (1753);
seven years later he translates into Danish an English
work Ox the Great Advantages of a Godly Life
(1760); whilst his last work is a Statestecal Account
of the Danish Army (1762), Three years later he
died (1765), leaving an unblemished reputation, and
his great addition to the history and literature of
England neither challenged nor suspected.

So far as passing off on the world a fictitious
composition was concerned, he was completely suc-
cessful. No suspicion or fear of detection appears to
have haunted him ; the taint on his fame was posthu-
mous. Nor was discovery, when it came, of that
conclusive kind which convinces everybody; many
distinguished authorities believed in his story, and
not a few believe in it still. Iftheir faith has survived
the perusal of Mr. Mayor's preface, nothing is ever
likely to disturb it. But some mystery still attaches
to the story.
CHAPTER III.
GREEK FORGERY: CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES.

OF all the names which belong to the darker side
of literature none is more famous or interesting than
that of Constantine Simonides, the Greek, who claims
the year 1820 as that of his birth. For with what-
ever right Simonides is assigned to the forging
fraternity, his industry, his learning, and his ad-
ventures claim for him a position apart, whilst it
may be doubted whether any of his contemporaries
in the learned world at all approached him in the
art of calligraphy or in his knowledge of pale-
ography.

And it may be questioned whether the world is
yet right as to the truth or falsity of all the claims of
Simonides. The received theory about him, that he
made use of genuine MSS. as a cloak to palm off
spurious documents, is open to the objection that it
was on the occasion of his frs¢ visit to Sir Frederick
Madden at the British Museum that he offered
documents, all of which Sir Frederick refused as
spurious, and that it was on the day following that
he brought another supply, all of which Sir Frederick

bought for the nation as genuine, and which are in-
39
40 LITERARY FORGERIES

cluded between the numbers 19386 and 19393 in
the Additional MSS. of the Museum. This was in
February, 1853. In this transaction, as described
by Sir Frederick himself, it is clear that the genuine
documents were in no sense used as a means to
facilitate the passing of forgeries; the forgeries, if
such they were, being offered first.

The manuscripts bought as genuine by the
Museum are beautiful specimens of writing on vellum,
and belong to any century from the tenth to the
fifteenth. The other vellum documents which Sir F.
Madden rejected as spurious were with some others
soon afterwards sold to that great collector of manu-
scripts, Sir Thomas Phillipps, who amassed his huge
collection of 60,000 manuscripts on the principle that
it was better to buy even a forgery than to let pass
a MS. that might be genuine, In the list of thirty-
one documents which he bought of Simonides (and
some of them for no mean sums) he distinguished
in a letter to the Atheneum (4th February, 1857) be-
tween those he thought genuine and those he thought
forgeries. Some he thought had been dipped in
tobacco-water to give them the semblance of age.
Others, rejected by Sir F. Madden, he accepted as
genuine ; the three first books of the //ad, for in-
stance, on a thin vellum roll in extremely diminutive
letters he declared to be, if a forgery, “the most
wonderful and successful attempt ever accomplished ”.
And so he thought of the Anacreon and of the
Hesiod. And with him will surely agree all whom
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 41

curiosity leads to inspect these literary marvels, now
in the possession of Mr. Fitzroy Fenwick at Thirle-
staine House in Cheltenham. It is wholly in-
credible that Simonides should have been at the
trouble of forging these works. It may not have
been beyond his power to produce some or all of
them in their different handwritings; but some of
them are of great length, No. 13865 consisting of 567
pages, No. 13866 of 770, and it is far less likely
that he forged these books than that he acquired
them, as he said, from the monasteries on Mount
Athos, where he resided for many months about the
year 1840.

As illustrating the uncertainty of the distinction
between genuine and spurious, it must be noted that
all these MSS., those accepted by Sir F. Madden and
those bought by Sir T. Phillipps, had been shown at
Athens in 1848, and the result of two Commissions,
appointed by the Government to examine them, were
on the whole but not decisively adverse to their
authenticity. The Homer was said to show striking
resemblances to a recent foreign edition of that bard ;
but it is so highly illegible that it is fair to doubt
whether any one ever really read it through. In
1851 Mr. Rancabes, the Greek poet, condemned all
Simonides’ MSS. as forgeries, in the Pandora; he
thought they all bore traces of having been com-
posed by one hand, and he calculated that the whole
collection might have been produced in about a year
and a half. But there was strong political antagon-
42 LITERARY FORGERIES

ism between Rancabes and Simonides, and this prob-
ably coloured the criticism. In any case the verdict
of Rancabes had no influence on Sir F. Madden,
whose judgment was at least unaffected by political
bias.

And it is in favour of the genuineness of most of
Sir Thomas’ purchases that their titles and the
names of their authors correspond with works which
still exist in the monasteries of Mount Athos, whence
Simonides professed to have derived them. Both
classical and ecclesiastical works of the same name
and character as those which figure among Sir
Thomas’ purchases abound in Professor Lampros’
recent Catalogue of all the manuscripts of all the
monasteries on Mount Athos, and Simonides had
abundant opportunities of acquiring or copying such
works during the period when he was first resident on
Mount Athos, between 1839 and 1841, and again in
1852. In the case of these MSS. the forgery, if such
there was, cannot be clearly traced to him, for he may
himself have become the innocent possessor of spuri-
ous works, He sold, for instance, to Sir Thomas
three Chrusobulls or Golden Bulls of the Emperors ;
Professor Lampros, in a recent account of the monas-
teries, speaks of many such charters as existent there,
but adds that few of the monks can read them, or dis-
tinguish the genuine ones from the false, ‘of which
there are not a few”. Sir Thomas regarded all his
three vellum charters with suspicion.

But it seems far more likely that Simonides had
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 43

come by these documents more or less as he declared
than that he had forged them himself.

It does not appear that Simonides attempted to
sell any other manuscripts of his collection whilst he
was in England between 1853 and 1855. His manu-
scripts he declared amounted at that time to 2,500,
and to have forged them all he must, as he said, have
lived longer than Methusaleh. At a later date he
had chests full of MSS. in London, of which Mr. C.
Stewart, his biographer, declared that, had he pos-
sessed a factory, he could not have manufactured
them in a lifetime. What became of them all after
Simonides had died of leprosy at Alexandria in 1867
it is impossible now to ascertain.

But the temptation to deceive was born of its
seducing facility, and Simonides was no votary of
strict veracity. From December, 1854, till April, 1855,
he was in Paris, and whilst there became acquainted
with the Count de Marcellus, who was collecting
materials for a work on Nonnus, the Greek poet of
the fifth century who wrote the Dzonzyszacs and versi-
fied the Gospel of St. John. Could Simonides throw
any light on Nonnus? Simonides thought so, and
after a fortnight came a fairly full account of Nonnus
from the lost work of Demetrius Magnes, Ox Poets
and Writers of the same Names, a work referred to
by name and ascribed to Demetrius by Diogenes
Laertius (i., 112; v., 3).

But Demetrius Magnes wrote this work in the
time of Cicero, and can therefore have hardly testified
44 LITERARY FORGERIES

to Nonnus, who lived six centuries later! Simonides
seems to have overlooked this fact, and to have
identified Demetrius Magnes with a Dionysius, a
Libyan archbishop (according to him) of the sixth
century, to whom he attributed the work Ox Poets and
Writers of the same Names, which had been written
many centuries earlier. This mistake vitiated all
the information he drew from this source. It was
from this same work of Demetrius Magnes, in the
first century B.c., that he sketched the life of his
famous Uranius, the Alexandrian writer of the fourth
century A.D. as well as of Hermas, and of Horus, the
Egyptian.

The Count de Marcellus testifies to the sedentary
and industrious life led by Simonides in Paris; he
describes him as taciturn, gloomy and suspicious,
and as dressed always in black. He testifies also to
his indifference to gain, and expresses his belief that
during the whole time he was in France he made no
attempt to sell any of his MSS. (Atheneum Frangats,
23rd February, 1856).

Tue SHEPHERD OF HERMAS.

But it was otherwise in Germany, whither he
went in July, 1855. His sojourn in Leipsic is famous
for his dealings with two works, of which one was
the first known Greek copy of the Shepherd of
flermas. The first three leaves of this had been ex-
tracted by him from a copy still existing in the mon-
astery of St. Gregory on Mount Athos; six other
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 45

leaves were a copy of a remaining portion left at
Mount Athos. It was for long disputed to what extent
this copied portion, and another copy by Simonides,
corresponded with the original, but the recent dis-
covery of the remainder of the original at St. Gregory
seems to absolve Simonides from the charge of any
worse crime than an endeavour to emendate a very
mutilated text, and to help himself by translating the
conclusion from the Latin translation. Professor
Dindorf bought this Hermas for the very moderate
price of 100 thalers, and there it is in the University
Library at Leipsic to this day.

But in the Imperial Library at Vienna there is
another bit of Simonides’ work, namely, a portion of
a palimpsest of the same Hermas, which was included
in the original negotiation with Dindorf, but restored
to Simonides after the discovery of the Uranius fraud.
It is entered in May, 18 56, as follows: ‘‘ Two leaves
of an alleged Greek palimpsest parchment: a gift of
Simonides, a proof of the art of fabrication of the
same learned man, being received and given as such”
(Hilgenfeld’s Hermas, 1887, Int. xii.). This must
mean that it was presented to the library as a speci-
men of the author’s skill in calligraphy, though
Simonides always spoke of it as one of the most
valuable works in the possession of the library.

Tue Ecyrprian History or URAnIuSs,

The other work which Simonides tried to dispose
of at Leipsic was the celebrated Uranius. But this
46 LITERARY FORGERIES

palimpsest Simonides never admitted to be a forgery,
and at a later date he is said to have refused good
offers for it from Sir T. Phillipps and the library at
Vienna. In any case the story in connexion with it
can never fail to edify and amuse mankind.

To a young fellow-countryman studying theology
at Leipsic Simonides had from time to time sent from
London certain Greek documents to correct ; strange
as it may seem that Simonides at the age of thirty-
five should have needed such aid from a youth who
was stilla mere student. With this student, Alexander
Lycurgus, in later times an archbishop in the Greek
Church, Simonides lived in 1855 in the same house
at Leipsic for three months. Lycurgus, who did not
know what a palimpsest was, and was quite ignorant
of paleeography, was led to suspect that his friend was
forging a palimpsest, and when Simonides offered the
Hermas and Uranius to Professor Dindorf, Lycurgus
thought it his duty to warn Dindorf of his suspicions.
Dindorf replied that to deceive Dindorf was a very
different thing from deceiving the English, and that
chemical tests would soon detect forgery. The test
being applied, the very faded underlying letters came
out blue, as they had to do if genuinely old, which
convinced Dindorf that Lycurgus’ warnings were the
offspring of jealousy. The letters, moreover, were
real Greek letters, and when Lycurgus pointed out
that the phrase «ar éuny idéay (“in my opinion”)
savoured of modern rather than of ancient usage the
great German scholar pronounced the phrase quite
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 47

unexceptionable (‘Er fand in dieser Phrase alles
griechisch,” Lycurgus’ Exthullangen).

Dindorf’s share in the transaction was as little
satisfactory from the financial as it was from the
classical point of view. Towards the end of No-
vember, 1855, he agreed to give Simonides 2,000
thalers for his Uranius, and on 1st January, 1856,
before starting to Berlin with the Uranius, he declared
his intention of asking 5,000 thalers for it from the
Prussian Government. The genuineness of Uranius
commending itself to Lepsius and to most of the
Academy at Berlin, the King of Prussia was induced
to offer this sum for the work; nor would Dindorf
leave it at Berlin before Lepsius had advanced 2,500
thalers in part payment for it. On 15th January
Simonides duly received his 2,000 thalers from
Dindorf, but before Dindorf had gone to Berlin,
Simonides had offered to refund the 2,000 thalers if
he had any doubt of the genuineness of the document,
Before the king had paid the stipulated sum, events
occurred which cut short the transaction; but had
nothing intervened, it would appear that whilst
Simonides would have stood to gain 2,000 thalers
from Uranius, Dindorf would have stood to gain 3,000.

And so convinced was he of the value of Uranius
that he arranged to get it published at Oxford, and
wrote for it a Latin preface which duly came out at
Oxford under the title of Uvanit Alexandrini de
Regibus Egyptorum Libri tres, but, on the very day
that it appeared, came news from Berlin that the
48 LITERARY FORGERIES

whole thing was considered a fraud, so that not more
than fifteen copies of this wonderful preface with ten
pages of specimens of the Greek text came into cir-
culation. The month of January had not passed
before Lepsius at Berlin and Tischendorf at Leipsic
had come to the conclusion that the Uranius was a
forgery. Chemical tests and the microscope are said
to have lent support to the historical doubts of Lepsius
and to the palzographical objections of Tischendorf.
Then arose a fierce dispute between Leipsic and
Berlin as to which had first been so clever as to de-
tect the fraud. But for Simonides the important
thing was that Lepsius came to Leipsic with the
Director of Police, and had him arrested, and con-
veyed to Berlin to take his trial. There by good
fortune, the Berlin magistracy, disclaiming juris-
diction, acquitted him, and let him go free.

Among the things which Lepsius says were found
in the Greek’s possession at the time of his arrest
were a number of false and genuzne MSS.; the
original Greek copy of Uranius; rusty nails for the
production of yellow ink; and books, including those
of Lepsius and Bunsen; and the untouched 2,000
thalers from Dindorf.

But Simonides contended that he had only used
coloured ink for making clearer the almost illegible
letters of the original text; as for the rusty nails,
he had from his youth been accustomed to drink
water impregnated with iron, and he used these nails
to turn common water into iron water! This would
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 49

hardly find credence with a British jury, but as
Dindorf had insisted on getting a Greek transcript
of Uranius, the supposed original copy was probably
the transcript, and produced after and not before the
palimpsest.

But the strangest thing concerns the books of
Lepsius. This scholar, the leading Egyptologist of
his day, had written books containing his ideas of
the proper order of the Egyptian kings; nor would
anything have been easier for Simonides than to
have constructed his Uranian history in accordance
with Lepsius’ conclusions, Lycurgus in fact charged
him with having done so, and accounted in that way
for Lepsius’ readiness at first to accept Uranius as
genuine. But from Lepsius’ own account it is quite
clear that what made him first suspect the Uranius
was its divergence from his own historical precon-
ceptions. Judging @ prior, this divergence was
exactly what one would not have expected in a for-
gery. For what object could a forger have in
making his list of kings conflict with all previous
lists? Take, for instance, the first dynasty (so-called)
beginning with Menes, and including eight names in
Manetho’s list ; why should Simonides have to some
extent altered the names and increased the number
of these kings? Why have given names to 138
kings before Menes when a total historical blank
in those days covered the time before Menes; and
why in nearly every detail have gone out of his way

to clash with the received Egyptology of his day?
4
50 LITERARY FORGERIES

Such a course was bound to prove fatal to Uranius
on the most cursory inspection by a competent
scholar.

But it is remarkable that whilst Lepsius did thus
condemn the Uranius on historical grounds, he did
not accept Tischendorf’s palzographical objections
toit. He considered the uncial writing of the under-
lying text to be written in a masterly style in the
manner of the first century of our era. A newspaper
quarrel between him and Tischendorf ensued on this
point, and even after the arrest of Simonides Lepsius
continued to question Tischendorf on the grounds of
his objections, feeling evidently some misgiving about
them.

Tischendorf was only the senior of Simonides by
five years, and in the science of paleography had
neither his knowledge nor his experience. He
based his claim to a decision on the ground of a
close acquaintance with nearly fifty palimpsests and
more than 120 Greek uncial MSS. His judgment
was correct with regard to the Hermas palimpsest,
but admittedly the two palimpsests had the ap-
pearance of a wide difference in age, and it may
be doubted whether his condemnation of the Uranius
was not as much prompted by an antecedent dis-
belief in anything Simonidean as by such real
paleographical tests as the subsequent advance of
paleography would now deem conclusive. It does
not appear that any paleographical objections came
from the Academy of Berlin. Tischendorf had the
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 51

glory of these to himself, and they failed to convince
a scholar like Lepsius.

The really fatal flaw in Uranius was the ascription
of a life of him to Dionysius or Demetrius Magnes.
For how in a work written in the time of Cicero
could there have been any mention of a writer
living some centuries later? But this difficulty
seems never to have occurred to the learned men of
Leipsic and Berlin.

Simonides after all his troubles, being banished
from Saxony, betook himself straight to Vienna, and
in the autumn of the same year published a vigorous
defence of himself and his Uranius at Munich
(Archeologisthe Abhandlungen). To this he was
compelled by the obstinate refusal of the Augsburg
Allgemeine Zeitung to print the letters he wrote in
explanation of his conduct. This was the more
regrettable in that the same paper had published on
29th November, 1853, a most damaging account of
Simonides’ antecedents at Athens and Constanti-
nople by Dr. Mordtman, an account which was
reproduced by the Atheneum on 23rd February,
1856. It is impossible to verify Dr. Mordtman’s
stories, and political partisanship ran so high at
the time that only a qualified credence can be at-
tached to them. But assuming Simonides to have
been guilty of the rascalities ascribed to him, how
was it that they in no way affected his friendship
with the immaculate Lycurgus, with whom he con-

stantly corresponded and in whose house he also
4* °
52 LITERARY FORGERIES

resided for three months in 1855? Lycurgus acted
as interpreter between Dindorf and Simonides ; why
did he not warn Dindorf from the first, if he believed
these stories, that he was dealing with a convicted
swindler? The line of high moral superiority taken
by Lycurgus is by no means justified by his own
account of his relations with Simonides.

That there really existed a writer called Uranius
is proved by the frequent allusions to him by
Stephanus of Byzantium, the Greek grammarian of
the fifth or sixth century. But Simonides’ claim for
him that he composed as many as sixty works, in-
clusive of the three books on the kings of Egypt,
rests only on the authority of Demetrius or Dio-
nysius Magnes in his aforesaid work Ox Poets
and Writers of the same Names, written some
centuries before the supposed age of Uranius.
Simonides seems to have spoken as if all these
works were in his possession: works dealing with
the customs and dwellings of the Egyptians, with the
archeology and the kings of Ethiopia, with Arabian
history, with Lybia, Lycia, Caria and so forth. Is
it possible that he possessed or contemplated forging
palimpsests dealing with all these subjects? It can
only be replied that, having regard to the works
actually published by Simonides and to the list of
those which he wrote but did not publish, quoted in
the Memoir of him by his friend Charles Stewart,
nothing was impossible to the extraordinary industry
and versatility of this wonderful being.
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 53

His travels corresponded with his literary activity.
After the Uranius episode he seems to have travelled
widely in Europe, visiting all the chief libraries, and
returning to London in April, 1858. In 1857 he
edited or rather wrote three numbers of a magazine
in Greek and German called AZemnon. It is mainly
devoted to an exposition of the author's theories
about Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is prefaced by an
introduction which reads like a showman’s opening
ofacircus. It gives the names of 112 lost Egyptian
writers, and many other wonders. It also contains
a defence of Uranius and a comparison of several
alleged copies of the Shepherd of Hermas.

Tue Mayer Papyrt.

But it was not till 1860 that Simonides again
came prominently before the world. When he did
so, he as usual caused a Stir.

It was on 13th February that he called on Mr.
Joseph Mayer of Liverpool with a request to in-
spect his celebrated museum of antiquities.

On 22nd February he dedicated to Mr. Mayer,
“as a small mark of his personal attachment,” his
Brief Dissertation on Flieroglyphic Letters, in ex-
planation of five Egyptian antiquities in the Museum.
It was published in Greek and English by Mr.
David Nutt, abounds with ingenious interpretations
of the hieroglyphic characters, and frequently quotes
the authority of Uranius.

But the great discovery was to follow. Mr.
54 LITERARY FORGERIES

Mayer had acquired, partly by purchase from a
dealer called Sams and partly from the Rev. H.
Stobart, a number of papyri which he had never
examined and which had remained in a state of
neglect. The difficult work of unrolling these papyri,
of fixing them on canvas, and of deciphering them,
was conducted by Simonides in the Museum, in the
presence, more or less constant, of Mr. Mayer himself,
of the Curator of the Museum, and of Mr. John
Eliot Hodgkin. It was. not till August that some
of these papyri were removed to Simonides’ own
house for purposes of further examination. The
discovery therefore on 1st May of certain fragments
of St. Matthew’s Gospel on one of these papyri
would seem to have been made under conditions
which rendered fraud impossible or unlikely. Yet
the information appended at the end to the effect
that the Gospel had been written at the dictation of
St. Matthew by Nicolaus the Deacon in the fifteenth
year after the Ascension savoured of the highest
improbability. And if the papyrus was genuine,
it was the oldest known Christian document in
existence.

No wonder the literary world was excited. And
the excitement grew as the finds grew in number.
Within a few months Simonides had discovered
fragments from the Epistles of St. James and of St.
Jude; portions of eight chapters of the Book of
Genesis ; the Ten Commandments ; the Perzplus of
Hanno; the first page of a work by Aristzeus ; some
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 55

fragments of Zoroaster ; seven epistles of Hermippus ;
and a fragment of Androsthenes, an admiral of
Alexander the Great.

In this case there was no question of making
profit out of MSS., forged or genuine; the MSS.
were the property of Mr. Mayer, and Simonides’
only concern with them was their decipherment. But
the name of Simonides excited suspicion, though
the motive as well as the opportunity of forgery
were not discernible.

The Mayer papyri were exhibited and examined
at a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature on
the evenings of 9th and roth January, 1863, Sir F.
Madden, Sir H. Rawlinson, Simonides and others
being present. The Report of the Council was read
on 11th February, and was strongly condemnatory
of the genuineness of the documents. The con-
demnation was founded on such facts as the simi-
larity in the handwriting of the MSS., albeit they
purported to be of different ages ; the juxtaposition of
different dates and characters on the same papyrus ;
the unusual length of the lines of the writing; the
difference in the colour of most of the papyri from
that of genuine papyri. And one papyrus was de-
nounced as “a rank forgery” by reason of certain
little flecks of red blotting-paper which Mr. C. W.
Goodwin discovered, and which he maintained had
been used to erase the Hieratic writing in order to
make place for the subsequent Greek writing. But
it is questionable whether this blotting-paper had
56 LITERARY FORGERIES

not been legitimately used in the difficult work of
unrolling and mounting the papyri previous to de-
ciphering them. And the admission that Simonides
exhibited two rolls of Hieratic writing, “the genuine-
ness of which was not doubtful,” sets one wondering
whether the conclusions of the majority of the Council
were correct, or would stand the test of the great
advance that has since been made in the science of
palzography.

Simonides published excellent facsimiles in 1861
and 1864 of most of these papyri. But it is best to
inspect the originals as he mounted them himself in
the Museum of the Free Public Library at Liverpool,
where they may still be seen, together with tracings
taken by him for his lithographed facsimiles, It is
almost impossible to believe in his manufacture of
these papyri. They correspond in writing and ap-
pearance with numberless other papyri which have
of recent years been discovered and published. And
there are in the collection three papyri, still unrolled,
time-worn and brittle, looking like huge cigars, and
containing no one knows what precious secrets of
antiquity. If these are forgeries, they can hardly
be forgeries by Simonides ; and if he was guiltless
in respect of these, he was presumably guiltless in
respect of the others.

One of the chief objections urged in 1863 against
these papyri was the similarity of the handwriting
in documents belonging to widely different periods.
But this similarity is the last thing that can be fairly
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 57

predicated of them. Let any one compare the two
volumes of the facsimiles, and it is rather the
diversity than the similarity of the handwriting
which will strike his attention.

As little force can now be attached to another
argument urged at the time against the papyri by
Mr. Vaux, secretary to the Literary Society, in an
Atheneum review of Simonides’ facsimiles (7th
December, 1861). Mr. Vaux laid it down dog-
matically as “an undoubted fact that no MSS. of
any kind, if we except the Hieratic papyri, are known
to ascend to the first or second century, and that of
those of the fourth or fifth there are not more than
five or six throughout all the libraries of Europe”.
Therefore, it was argued, these papyri, for many of
which Simonides claimed the first century, could not
be genuine. But since recent discoveries in Egypt
have carried many Greek papyri manuscripts as far
back even as the third and fourth century B.c., this
argument has ceased to exist.

In short, if these Mayer papyri are to continue
to be regarded as spurious, it ought to be only after
an impartial re-study of them, and a clear statement
of the palzeographical reasons for differentiating them
from others which are accepted as genuine,

In a manuscript letter of Charles Stewart, who
wrote the Memoir of Simonides, the following in-
teresting description gives a vivid picture of the
man as he appeared at that time in England: “ He

”

was,” says Stewart, “one of the most remarkable-
58 LITERARY FORGERIES

looking men I have ever seen. Rather under the
middle stature he appeared bodily to be nothing
but bones and muscles, but it was not his body but
his head that was remarkable. Immense black
whiskers, moustache, and imperial; huge black
eyebrows; an enormous mass of jet-black glossy
and curly hair, parted very much on one side and
all thrown over on to the other; deep-sunk but fiery
and piercing eyes ; dark swarthy visage ; massive lips
and strongly marked mouth made up a face not
easily forgotten. But the forehead is in itself a
marvel. For about the height of an ordinary fore-
head it rises perpendicularly and is exactly what a
phrenologist would call a finely developed organisa-
tion, but above this rises a second forehead, only the
second storey takes its rise one step farther back
than the first. This step forms a kind of ledge. The
consequence is that when he puts his hat on it only
covers the top forehead, and as that recedes a long
way back the outside rim of the hat is level with
the bridge of the nose. The effect is curious in the
extreme with the proprietor of this double-storied
forehead.”

But Stewart’s AZemozr of his Greek friend cannot
be wholly trusted. For Stewart of course could only
impart what Simonides chose to tell him, and what
Simonides told was not necessarily the truth.
Simonides, for instance, always said that his father
had died in early life, leaving him to the care of his
uncle Benedict, head of the monastery of Pantelemon
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 59

or Russico on Mount Athos. But Simonides left in
England a number of letters from his father to him-
self, which I have seen, and one of these is dated as
late as 1862.

Tue Srnaitic Copex.

This fact of course throws doubt on all that rests
only on the word of Simonides. But it does not
absolutely disprove all his assertions, of which by far
the most amazing was his claim to have written
when at Mount Athos in 1840 the Sinaitic Codex
(Codex A), which Tischendorf discovered at Mount
Sinai under highly singular circumstances between
the years 1844 and 1859. The claim of Simonides
to have transcribed this Codex, at the suggestion of
his alleged uncle Benedict, as an intended present
for the Czar Nicholas J., was first publicly made in
the Guardian of 5th September, 1862, and in the
Literary Churchman on 16th December of the
same year. Nor could anything be more precise
and circumstantial in detail, or more temperate in
tone than the letters in which this claim was made.
The implication that Tischendorf had mistaken a
manuscript of the nineteenth century for one of the
fourth naturally roused that irascible theologian to a
condition of fury.

That Simonides was a good enough calligrapher,
even at an early age, to have written the Codex,
is hardly open to doubt, and it is in his favour that
the world was first indebted to him in 1856 for the
60 LITERARY FORGERIES

opening chapters in Greek of the Shepherd of
ffermas, with a portion of which the Codex Sinaiticus
actually terminates. The coincidence seems almost
more singular than can be accounted for by chance.

But the experts in paleography were strongly
on the side of Tischendorf. Tregelles, the distin-
guished scholar and Plymouth Brother, declared that
a man might as well pretend that the Alexandrian
or the Vatican MS. was a modern work as claim
to have written the Sinaitic Codex. And the famous
Mr. Henry Bradshaw, who with Tregelles had in-
spected the Codex itself at Tischendorf’s house at
Leipsic in July, 1862, declared himself, in a letter to
the Guardian of 23rd January, 1863, as being ‘‘as
absolutely certain of the genuineness and antiquity
of the Codex Sinaiticus as of his own existence”,
And Mr. Scrivener, who made the Sinaitic Codex
his special study, expressed himself equally strongly
against the claim of Simonides.

Nevertheless these dogmatic assurances are not
quite convincing. Simonides’ claim was supported
on its first appearance by certain letters in the
Guardian purporting to come from Alexandria and
signed “ Kallinikos Hieromonachos”. These letters,
inspected at a meeting of the Society of Literature,
were thought to be in a handwriting identical with
that of Simonides and to be written on paper like
that used in Simonides’ own letters; the inference
being that Simonides had written them himself and
sent them to Alexandria to be posted back to Eng-
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 61

land (Parthenon, 14th February, 1863). But this
alleged similarity of handwriting was never certified
by any expert in handwriting.

And the attempt to throw doubt on the existence
of Kallinikos failed as completely as the attempt
to dispose in the same way of Benedict. Other
Greeks besides Simonides had lax ideas of the value
of truth. There was Nicolaides, who had been
Archdeacon of Salonica from 1839 to 1853; who
had visited Mount Athos five times; and who
claimed to know all the MSS. existing there inti-
mately ; he wrote to the Parthenon that he not only
had never heard of Benedict but that he disbelieved
in his existence. Yet one has only to refer to
Lampros’ Catalogue of the Mount Athos MSS.
to find Benedict’s name appended to several MSS.,
and to one as late as 1844 (though Simonides gave
1840 as the year of his death). (See Nos. 5999,
6118, 6194, 6360, 6362, 6393.) The same work
attests as conclusively the real existence of Kallinikos.
A MS. dated March, 1867, is signed with the hand
of Kallinikos who is “also the least of the monks
of the monastery of Russico” (z.e. Pantelemon)
(No. 638). And there is another MS. at Pantele-
mon, copied by the hand of Constantine Simonides
on 27th March, 1841 (6405), and two other copies
of the same work by Kallinikos Monachos (6406,
6407), which prove that Kallinikos and Simonides
were at Pantelemon at the same time and associated
in the same work.
62 LITERARY FORGERIES

Simonides, who was always most precise in his
information about real or feigned persons, declares
that this Kallinikos was born in 1802, a Thessalian,
named originally Kuriakos; on his admission to the
Church he took the name of Kallinikos, and for his
bravery in the war of the Greek Revolution he
received the surname of Keraunos. Whether this
was so or not, Kallinikos was a real person, and his
intervention in the controversy with his attestation of
having seen Simonides write the Codex cannot be
brushed aside as the testimony of a fabulous being.

In fact it is upon Kallinikos that the whole
question hinges. For Kallinikos is said to have had
lithographed at Moscow in 1853 and at Odessa in
1854 certain letters between himself and Simonides
and the patriarch Constantius, wherein repeated allu-
sion is made to the Codex prepared by Simonides
for the Czar. One of these collections of litho-
graphed letters is called ‘ Autographa” and the other
‘““Spoudaion hupomnema”. They are both at the
British Museum, presented apparently by Mr. James
Young, the eminent antiquary, who received them
as a gift from Simonides. But were these letters
really lithographed in the years assigned to them
in the frontispiece? May they not have been con-
cocted by Simonides in 1863 and then antedated
by ten years in order to support his claim? This
has never been satisfactorily settled. Mr. John
Eliot Hodgkin set himself the task in 1863 of trying
to arrive at the truth, and he was informed by a
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 63

“correspondent of unquestionable reputation at
Odessa” that the foreman of certain lithographing
works in that city perfectly remembered the printing
of the letters at the time alleged. But in the case
of Simonides, who was well skilled in lithography,
one would be glad of some stronger proof.

As such proof Simonides showed Mr. Hodgkin
a letter to himself at Munich from a friend B.
Panchalos in London, dated March, 1858, which
refers chiefly to these publications by Kallinikos in
1853. A copy of this letter in the handwriting of
Simonides is still in the possession of Mr. Hodgkin,
with a note by him, to the effect that the original
letter was in a peculiar writing and that the post-
marks seemed to be real ones. The writer professes
to have brought from Odessa to London the letters
and some works by Simonides which Kallinikos had
lithographed. But Mr. Hodgkin’s note bears the
date of 21st July, 1863, and it is conceivable that
the original letter had been produced at a later date
than its apparent one.

But if these lithographed letters really were pro-
duced in the fifties, long before Simonides made his
claim, and if they prove the truth of his statements
concerning his work on the Codex, it is of course
possible to maintain that it was not the Sinaitic Codex
which he produced, but another. Simonides claimed
to have seen his own work, the Codex, at Mount Sinai,
when he was there in 1852, and his most important
lithographed letters are dated from Mount Sinai in
64 LITERARY FORGERIES

the March and April of 1852. But was Simonides at
Mount Sinai at that time? Stewart says, presumably
on the authority of Simonides himself, that he went to
Mount Athos for the third time in 8th October, 1851,
and that he stayed there a whole year, which of course
is wholly incompatible with his writing letters from
Mount Sinai in the March and April of 1852. But
again Stewart may have made a mistake about the
dates, and it would be unfair to press his statement too
strongly against Simonides.

It is to be regretted that this matter was never
cleared up at the time the claim was made. It cannot
be said to have been settled by the mere opinions of
Tregelles or Bradshaw, or by the more critical and
palzographical objections urged by Mr. Scrivener in
his Lntroduction to the Stnartic Codex (1867). The
two former examined the Codex two months before
Simonides had made his claim to it as his work, so
that they had no reason to examine it with suspicion,
And Mr. Scrivener’s argument that no mere youth of
at most nineteen could in a few months have com-
posed a volume of nearly 4,000,000 uncial letters,
though convincing about most youths, is not con-
vincing where that youth was Simonides. ~ On the
side of Simonides is his unlimited skill in calligraphy ;
the very audacity of such a claim if entirely baseless ;
the remarkable presence in the Codex of a portion of
the Shepherd of Hermas, which Simonides was the
first scholar ever to have seen in Greek; the very
natural allusions to the work in the lithographed
CONSTANTINE SIMONIDES 65

letters ; the fact that no visitor to the monastery at
Mount Sinai before 1844 had ever seen or heard of such
a work as belonging to the monks ; and the very ex-
traordinary story told by Tischendorf of his discovery
and acquisition of the Codex. The question there-
fore, pending the acquisition of further evidence, must
remain among the interesting but unsolved mysteries
of literature.

Simonides appears to have left England some-
what hurriedly in 1864, nor is it known what became
of him between that date and the year 1867 when he
died, or at least is said to have died, at Alexandria
(Notes and Quertes for 22nd October, 1867, 3rd
Series, xii., 339). His literary activity was extraordin-
ary. Besides the works he published in Odessa, in
England and in Germany, he wrote many others which
were never published. His chief interest was to
prove that his method of interpreting Egyptian hiero-
glyphics was superior to as well as different from that
of Champollion and other Egyptologists, and it may
be suspected that he was often not above resorting to
trickery in support of his theory. His learning was
prodigious, but it occasionally failed him, as where he
placed the death of Irenzeus in 292 (a full century
after the probable or possible date), and where he
drew on Demetrius Magnes for information which
that writer could by no possibility have supplied. It
was from Demetrius (or Dionysius) Magnes that he
drew, as from an inexhaustible well, for his ex-

traordinarily minute information about numberless
5
66 LITERARY FORGERIES

people, many of whom were long posterior in date
to their alleged biographer. But Simonides did not
always invent or forge or lie; probably these lapses
occupied the smaller portion of his activity, and much
of his work was honest, laborious and useful. But
naturally discrimination in these circumstances was
difficult or impossible, and his contemporaries found
it the easier course to reject as spurious anything con-
nected with his name. It is probable that scepticism
has gone farther than was necessary in this direction,
and that literature has lost in consequence some
acquisitions that rightfully belong to it. But of all
the figures of the nineteenth century that are con-
nected with the shady side of literature, Simonides,
with his extensive learning, his knowledge of manu-
scripts, his miraculous calligraphy, his passionate
nature, and above all his claim to the authorship of
the Sinaitic Codex, will ever stand out as pre-eminently
the first of his order. In literary ability he surpassed
all his contemporaries, but unhappily the essential ele-
ment of truth formed no part of his mental constitution.
CHAPTER IV.
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO.

Tue forged literature of the world in general or of a
particular country presents the spectacle of an inex-
haustible mine, the contemplation of which fills an
explorer with consternation as he thinks of the mar-
vellous ability and industry displayed in the illicit
working of its glittering veins. His only course in
such bewilderment is to concentrate his attention on
a few particular workers, and to study the writings
of those who in this line of labour have attained to
most distinction and made their names in some
sense representative of the nationalities that produced
them.

Of all the forgeries, detected or undetected, in the
Italian world of letters, none is more famous than
that associated with the name of Annius (whose real
name was Nannius) of Viterbo, who lived from 1432
to 1502, when he is said to have been poisoned for
his too unreserved denunciations of the infamies of
Cesar Borgia. It is certain that Annius contributed
more to the confusion of literature, whether innocently
or not, than any man of his own or of any other

generation,
67 5*
68 LITERARY FORGERIES

And it was perhaps therefore fitting that in the year
1558 his painted figure should have been placed on
one of the walls of the municipal palace at the place
on which his learning cast a sort of lustre.

Annius belonged to the order of Preaching
Brothers or Dominicans, and was a man of mark in
his generation. In 1471, when in his fortieth year,
he preached certain sermons at Genoa which subse-
quently were published as his first book under the
title of Zractatus de Imperio Turcarum, or a treatise
on the rule of the Turk, a subject of very lively
interest in Europe, when twenty years had not yet
passed since the capture of Constantinople by the
Turk. This first work was followed nine years later
(1480) by the publication of some more sermons,
based on the Book of Revelations, entitled De futurts
Christianorum triumphis in Turcas et Saracenas,
wherein the preacher foretold an earlier termination
of the Ottoman Empire than history has yet had the
happiness to see fulfilled.

The evils of lending money on interest next oc-
cupied his literary activity (1492), and in 1499, in
the papacy of the notorious Alexander VI., he was
raised to the position of Master of the Vatican. To
this office the duty appertained of examining, correct-
ing, rejecting, or approving everything that was
printed at Rome; all libraries and printers were
under his jurisdiction; and he had a right to a seat
on the Congregation of the Index.

Yet the very year preceding the attainment of
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 69

this post of literary autocrat Annius had himself
published a work which generally counts among the
marvels of literary falsification! This was his famous
De Comentarits Antiquitatum, published at Rome
in 1498. He had moreover the reputation of being
half-demented, for so at least Scaliger was led to be-
lieve (Scaligerana, i, 195: “Annius Viterbensis a
été vu par un homme qui me I’a dit il etait fou et
talis habebatur ”).

So that his appointment to this particular post
was as incongruous as it was possible to be, in the
light of subsequent knowledge.

Annius opened his work with a fulsome dedica-
tion to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and then
proceeded to a preface on the special duty of himself
as a professor of theology towards the truth and
towards his country. To defend the glory and anti-
quity of his country, nay, of the whole of Europe,
was his aim; and though he could lay no claim
to elegance of language, he could claim to give
the “sole and simple truth”. He would yield to
others the point of language, but not that of the
discovery of truth. If any critics objected, let them
come forward in his lifetime, when he would forth-
with answer them; let them not wait till he was
dead.

The work consisted of seventeen distinct treatises,
of which eleven were by different writers, who had
been lost to the world till their discovery by Annius.
The texts of these authors he interspersed with the
70 LITERARY FORGERIES

most prolix commentaries of his own, these con-
stituting by far the larger part of his voluminous
work. And if genuine the authors themselves
were well deserving of comment, for they would
have thrown light on some of the remotest and
darkest periods of history. Priceless would they
have been, had their authenticity only been above
suspicion.

It is impossible to do more than glance at the
several lost works of ancient times which Annius
claimed to have recovered for the world.

1. That Myrsilus, a Lesbian of unknown date,
wrote an account of the origins of Italy and Etruria
is known by the references made to him by ancient
writers, and notably by Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
who, treating of the same obscure and vexed question
of the origin of Etruria, borrowed much from him
for the first book of his Axtzguztzes. Annius says
with truth that a reader of Dionysius might seem to
be reading Myrsilus, as given by himself. But
Annius, or another, might have produced Myrsilus
by the help of Dionysius.

Nothing could be more ingenious than his account
of the colonisation of Italy by the misty Pelasgian
and other tribes of Greek origin, and his treatment
of the question of the Lydian or of the aboriginal
beginnings of Etruria. But the authenticity of
Myrsilus admits unfortunately of more dispute.

2. About his discovery of twenty-two fragments
of Cato the Censor, who was known to have written
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 71

a work on the origins of Italy, Annius vouchsafes in-
formation, which he subsequently applies to nine of
his discoveries. He tells us that he found his Cato
in the ancient collections of a certain Master William
of Mantua. Cato had been stirred to write of the
splendid origin of Italy in the Golden Age by the
impudent claim of the Greeks to have been the first
colonisers of Italy. The work breathes just the anti-
Greek spirit one would expect to find in Cato the
Censor, and abounds in complaints of Greek men-
dacity, Greek vanity and Greek verbosity.

The information is mostly geographical, dealing
with the origins of Italian towns and people, as Pliny
also dealt with them in the third book of his Vatural
ffistory. Pliny refers to Cato’s work, and probably
borrowed from it. But may not these fragments of
Cato, belonging to Master William of Mantua, have
been borrowed from Pliny and other writers? A
certain passage in Pliny closely resembles Cato in the
names of Etrurian towns, but the order of the names
is different, as one would expect, if Pliny had been
the mine from which these fragments of Cato had
been hewn, But the fragments cannot have been
an easy work to compile, and the learning of their
accompanying commentaries is prodigious.

3. Caius Sempronius, we know from Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, busied himself, like Cato, with the
origins of the Italian cities, Annius professes to have
failed to find this work, but suggests that one he
found and commented on, De Duvtszone et Choro-
72 LITERARY FORGERIES

graphia Italie, was the same. Much is therein told
of the geography of the Alps and of the towns of
Italy, and we learn that Rome did not derive its
name from Romulus, having been founded by Saturn
in the Golden Age many centuries earlier. This
Sempronian work resembles that of Cato very much
both in its substance and in its style. Sempronius
also condemns the levity, mendacity and boastfulness
of the writers of Greece ; but this anti-Greek animus
appears also in Annius himself, constituting a strong
and suspicious family likeness between all the three
writers.

4. Quintus Fabius Pictor was one of the oldest
and best historians of Rome, who lived and took
actual part in the Gallic war (B.c. 225) and in the
second Punic war. His history has not come down
to us, but Annius found two books of his, treating
respectively of the Golden Age and of the topography
of the hills of Rome. Pretty is his description of
that Age, which lasted till the reign of Ninus, King
of Assyria, and so like that of Ovid that one would
think the poet had borrowed from Pictor or Pictor
from the poet. And indeed Pictor describes the
original ground of Rome as “‘a pasture for oxen”
(pascua bobus erat), Cato also strangely enough using
the same identical words ; but the words are borrowed
from Ovid who says of early Rome :—

“Tantaque res paucis pascua bobus erat” (Fast, i.,
244). How came Cato and Pictor to quote Ovid
more than a century before Ovid was born?
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 73

5. Archilochus was a Greek chronographer who
flourished, Annius thinks, about the twenty-ninth
Olympiad, that is, about the year 664. In the few
pages which Annius recovered from Archilochus’
work on dates (De Temporibus) we find Archi-
lochus in agreement with Pictor about the Golden
Age that preceded Ninus; and he tells us of five
kings of Troy before Priam and of seven distinct
Homers who lived before the famous poet, twenty-
four years before his own time. Arrchilochus, a
shadowy figure himself, derives his chronology from
one more shadowy still, from Maseas Phenix Damas-
cenus, who belongs to the absolutely impenetrable
mist.

6. Metasthenes, an historian of the Persian annals,
was another chronographer of whom Annius was so
fortunate as to find a Latin translation. He was a
Persian priest, and to be distinguished from Megas-
thenes, a Greek historian, who was no priest at all.
It is singular that Metasthenes should begin with
an allusion to the credibility of priests in general,
and particularly of that other priest of Babylon,
Berosus, five of whose lost books Annius also had
the happiness to discover. And he proceeds to
give an analysis of the reigns of the Assyrian
kings, as given by Berosus; and so he continues
with his list of dates down to the time of Alexander
the Great.

7. Another work of a similar chronological nature
introduced to the world by Annius was the Breviarium
74 LITERARY FORGERIES

de Temporibus by Philo Judzus. It was so called
as being a “brief” summary of historical time from
Adam down to his own time. Other works by Philo
have been discovered since the days of Annius, some
of which are accounted genuine and others spurious.
Annius expresses his wonder that this Brevzarzum
had come to be so neglected of theologians and
bishops, since it contained so much good material
against the Jews; but how could they have neglected
what was non-existent? And it is remarkable how
similar in style is this dull chronology of Jewish
history to the preceding chronologies of Archilochus
and Metasthenes.

8. Annius could not discover who Xenophon (not
the historian) was, but he thought that he was the son
of Griphon and lived about the year 400. At all
events Annius became possessed of a Latin trans-
lation of his treatise De Lguzvoczs, about different
people or things bearing similar names. He could
tell us of the several bearers of the name of Homer,
of Ninus, of Ogyges, or of Cadmus, also of the
several floods that have left a tradition in history.
And his information is conveyed in the same terse
and simple manner which characterises all these lost
writers, and is confirmative of their statements on
many points.

9. Two fragments of an /éznerary of Antoninus
Pius are not the least curious documents in this
medley collection. These are expressly referred to
the collection of Master William, made in the year
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 75

1315. It was the piety of Antonine, according to
Annius, which caused him to produce this /¢znerary
of the whole world ; it was to make travelling easier
for the poor, for strangers, for fugitives, or for
soldiers. And as it was for the use of people of all
nationalities, and it was only the Italians who
measured distances by miles, it gave the names
of towns in their order but not the distances be-
tween them. In this respect it differed from other
Itineraries claiming to be that of Antonine; as it
also did in recording six routes unrecorded else-
where, including one by sea, leading from Rome
to Gaul, with the names of the several towns
passed on the way; just the names, and nothing
more.

10. But the most interesting and longest of
Annius’ discoveries purported to be five complete
books of the lost A/zstory of Berosus, of whose
writings only sundry fragments had sailed safely
down the stream of time. Berosus of Babylon lived
in the third century z.c., and wrote a Greek history
of Babylonia, of which modern learning has tended
to confirm the accuracy ; but the Berosus of Annius
is another matter. He begins with the Caldzan
ideas of the world before the flood; of the terrible
and wicked giants; and of Noah; and of the coloni-
sation of the world. Then he leads us through a
maze of Babylonian kings, and of their contemporary
kings in other parts of the world, and we wonder at
Anameon, founder of Mzonia, whose reign of 150
76 LITERARY FORGERIES

years robs our own Parr and Henry Jenkins of their
honours of longevity.

It was in the reign of Jupiter Belus, the second
King of Babylon, that Tyras founded Tyre, and in
the reign of Ninus, the next king, that Iberus ruled
and gave his name to the Iberi. Much are we told
of the inventions and travels and exploits of Osiris,
and a host of mythical persons and places are treated
with the honours of history in these marvellous five
books of Berosus.

But how came Annius by these books of Bero-
sus? He alludes incidentally to a monk of the name
of Mathias, provincial of the Armenian Dominican
Order, whom he had once entertained at Genoa, and
to another Armenian in his company, a Master
Georgius, from whom he received this Berosus as a
gift (“a cujus socio magistro Georgio similiter Armeno
hanc Berosi deflorationem dono habui”).

No one can now dispute the existence of this
Armenian, but it is singular that Annius should have
been so fortunate as to acquire from a Master William
of Mantua and a Master Georgius of Armenia these
treasures of antiquity, both treating of similar topics
in so similar a way.

11. Berosus, the Babylonian historian, is natur-
ally followed by Manetho, the Egyptian. Recent
Egyptian research has conferred on the fragments
of Manetho’s chronology of Egypt more credit than
it formerly possessed, but Annius begins his history
by Manetho with a king Egyptus, whose tomb as
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 77

yet has responded to no search. Contemporaries
with Egyptus were Romus, King of the Celts, Faunus
Priscus, King of the Aborigines, Pandion, King of
Athens, and Belochus the younger, King of Assyria.
And so the weary tale continues through many kings
and countries, supplemented with abundant learning
from Annius’ inexhaustible store of mythological
learning. But one thing seems fatal to his Manetho.
For one certain fact about Manetho seems to be that
he wrote his lost Greek history of Egypt in the reign
of Ptolemy Philadelphus (8.c. 284-246); but Annius
infers from an alleged comparison of the name of
Pharaoh with the Roman name of Augustus for an
emperor that Manetho lived some time after the
establishment of the Roman Empire, instead of more
than 200 years before it.

The genuineness of Annius’ work was for long a
subject of dispute among the learned, and many are
the names of no mean reputation which ranged
themselves at one time on the side of the Dominican
monk. But the doubters ultimately carried the day,
till at last we find the judgment of the nineteenth
century expressed as follows by Tiraboschi in his
fTistory of Italian Literature (vi., 15): ‘There is
no one who is moderately versed in the first elements
of literature who does not laugh at the stories pub-
lished and commented on by Annius ”.

But before this conclusion was reached many of
these stories, told with such an air of assurance and
learning, found their way into other books, to the
78 LITERARY FORGERIES

detriment of their credit and the mortification of
their authors. Poor Leandro Alberti, who in 1568
published a Description of Italy, is said to have died
of annoyance when he became aware of the worth-
lessness of some of the statements he had borrowed
from Annius. And doubtless there were many
others whom a tougher moral fibre enabled to sur-
vive a similar cause for vexation of spirit.

The question admits of less easy settlement, how
far Annius was personally responsible for the literary
imposture associated with his name. Was he the
guilty author of the fraud, or only its innocent
transmitter? The balance of opinion rather favours
the latter alternative, but the internal evidence
against Annius is decidedly strong.

It appears from a letter of Annius to his brother
Thomas, of the same order, that he published his
commentaries in compliance with his brother’s re-
quest, and in this letter he alludes to having brought
back with him from Mantua to Viterbo nine of his
eleven rediscovered works ; that is, all of them except
the Manetho and Berosus. He had returned with
the Most Reverend Cardinal Paul de Campo Fulgoso,
and brought back his fragments of Philo, Xenophon,
Sempronius, Fabius Pictor, Cato, Antonine, Metas-
thenes, Archilochus and Myrsilus, The inference
is that he obtained all of them, as he asserts of his
Cato, from the collection of William of Mantua. But
a strange family resemblance pervades all of them,
as well as the Berosus and Manetho, which were
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 79

presumably both the gift of the Armenian Georgius.
And, though the diversity of writers and topics
would seem to lie beyond the possible fabrication
of a single brain, it is remarkable how they all play
into one another’s hands, and support one another’s
statements ; Methethenes, derived from the Mantuan,
corroborating Berosus, derived from the Armenian,
and Cato and the rest being generally in close
agreement with one another. And not only the
spirit but often the very words of the commentator
are very like those of his originals; Annius as well
as Cato and Sempronius denounce the mendacity of
the Greeks, and the expression avgumento est (‘for a
proof”), a favourite with Annius, occurs also in some
of his originals. And all these different writers
writing at different times give us information sur-
prisingly similar in kind to that of which Annius was
himself personally fond. Thus Berosus tells us that
it was from Macedon, son of Osiris, that Macedonia
received its name; and the modern name of Belgium
is made to descend from his Beligius, King of the
Celts. Manetho is responsible for Paris, another
King of the Celts, as the father of our modern
Parisians in the time of Menophis, second King of
Egypt; for Phenix, the founder of Phceenicia; and
for Lemannus, another Celtic king, whose name still
survives in the alternative but less common name
for the lake of Geneva. Cato introduces us to King
Rhetus as giving his name to the Rhetii, and
Sempronius to Ligur, the founder of Liguria.
80 LITERARY FORGERIES

It is this unity of spirit throughout his collection
which constitutes the greatest suspicion against
Annius himself. Had he obtained them all from
William of Mantua, the fabrication might have been
thrown back on William ; but that William should
have had a Metasthenes showing an intimate know-
ledge of the Berosus of the Armenian Georgius, and
that both these works should have fallen into the
hands of Annius, passes the bounds of a credible
coincidence. We are thrown back on the Domini-
can’s own brain and on his marvellous knowledge of
literature as the most probable source of his collec-
tion. If there be any truth in the nebulous tradition
of an old thirteenth century Catalogue of Authors
in the Colbertin Library, as the possible source of
the titles of his works, it is still Annius who must
be held responsible for putting these shadows into
substance.

It was probably the inconceivability of any man
writing so immense a work for a mere pastime or
even for the propagation of his own ideas that led so
many learned men at the time to believe in Annius.
But among those who regarded his work as fictitious
were Casaubon and Antonio Augustino, Archbishop
of Tarragona. It was this Antonio, author of a
work on false Italian productions of other kinds,
who first told the story of Annius burying an in-
scribed stone near Viterbo and then contriving to
have it discovered by some workmen, the said stone

going to prove that Viterbo had been founded by
ITALIAN FORGERY: ANNIUS OF VITERBO 81

Isis and Osiris 2,000 years before the founding of
Rome.

The “ Tabula Cibellaria ” in the Museum at Viter-
bo, found in what Annius called the Ager Cibellarius,
proves that material as well as literary falsification
had its attraction for the clever Dominican.
CHAPTER V.
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN.

A MAN whose company Dr. Johnson would seek, in
preference even to that of Richardson, the novelist ;
whom he would often visit in his lodgings in Iron-
monger Row, Old Street, or hold converse with in a
neighbouring alehouse ; for whose piety Johnson had
such reverence that even that arch-dissentient lost in
his presence the power to contradict ; and of whose
exemplary penitence he would often discourse towards
the close of his own life in terms of the highest praise ;
such a man must have been in a high degree remark-
able. And remarkable indeed from first to last was
George Psalmanazar, still of unknown birth and origin,
who made his first appearance in London early in the
eighteenth century.

When Johnson knew him Psalmanazar was about
eighty ; a man who earned a livelihood from his work
for the booksellers, but a man who enjoyed a some-
what wide notoriety for the earnestness of his piety
and the regularity of his devotions. This fact about
him which so impressed Johnson impressed his age
no less, causing him to be so highly esteemed that

the very children in his neighbourhood would not
82
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 83

pass him without some token of respect. Such was
the reward of a life that for about fifty years had
been consistently and sincerely religious. His ex-
emplary life ended in 1763, in about the eighty-fourth
year of his age.

Yet this sincerity seems to have grown out of
hypocrisy, and the self-chosen name of George Psal-
manazar is connected with one of the most astonishing
frauds in the history of literature. Coming to Eng-
land from the Continent, under the auspices of the
Rev. W. Innes, an army chaplain, he at once inter-
ested the religious world in his favour, by claiming
to be a native of Formosa, who had been converted
from an appalling heathenism to the truths and
practices of Christianity. No one ever guessed
rightly of what country he was a native, but there
was nothing Oriental about his skin or hair. This,
however, stood very little in his way. He found an
easy introduction to Compton, Bishop of London,
whose tenure of that see had been so eventful in the
reign of James IJ., and on whom he palmed off the
English Catechism translated into Formosan. Not
only did bishops and the clergy receive him gladly,
but even some men of learning declared his Formosan
language to be a real one because it was so regular
and grammatical ‘‘and so different from all they knew
both with respect to words and idioms”. This inter-
esting proselyte, who had trained himself to eat raw
flesh the better to support his character as an Oriental,

was introduced to all men of distinction in Church
6 *
84 LITERARY FORGERIES

and State, and we find him dining on 9th February,
1704, with Sir Hans Sloane, and eating his meat raw
in the company of two noblemen and the Prussian
ambassador. A week before at the Royal Institution
he had held a public discussion with Father Fontenay,
who had been for eighteen years a missionary in China,
and he had responded without loss of credit to the
searching questions put to him by that doubting
Father,

Psalmanazar’s own story was that he had left
Formosa. six years earlier, when he was nineteen.
This would have made him twenty-five at the time
of his coming to London, but he added some years
to his real age in order to make his story more
credible. Fora youth of twenty he had some right
to be regarded as a marvel. He had more than a
smattering of six languages, and wrote and spoke
Latin fluently. It was in Latin that he conversed
with Archbishop Tenison, Innes acting as interpreter,
and it was in Latin that he originally wrote his De-
scription of Formosa. ‘This, like the Catechism, he
wrote at the instigation of Innes, who, having used
him successfully as a stepping-stone to his own
preferment, afterwards deserted him. The book was
a reproduction of the many marvellous things about
Formosa he had propounded in conversation, but not
of everything. Asked, for instance, about longevity
in the island, he replied that 120 was accounted a
common age, and 100 a very moderate one; his own
grandfather had lived to 117, and was then as fresh
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 85

and vigorous as a young man, owing to his habit of
sucking the blood of a viper warm every morning!
But this story at least was not repeated in print.
There seems to have been no limit to British credu-
lity in the early years of Queen Anne. Good people
subscribed for the support of this marvellous proselyte,
and the Bishop of London had him sent to study at
Christ Church, Oxford, in the pious hope that he
would there instruct in Formosan some future mission-
aries to that promising island.

An exceedingly curious book is the Azstorical
and Geographical Description of Formosa, an [sland
subject to the Emperor of Japan, published in 1704,
and dedicated to the Bishop of London. Herodotus
himself could hardly have put human credulity to a
more severe strain than did Psalmanazar.

The Emperor of Japan conquered Formosa in a
strange manner. Under the pretext of religion, of
offering sacrifices in Formosa to the God of Formosa,
he sent a great army into the country. Thirty or
forty soldiers were placed in large litters, drawn by
two elephants, and at the windows of these litters
were placed the heads of oxen or rams, which removed
all suspicion from the minds of the natives. Then
the soldiers jumped out, and by threatening death to
the natives secured their acceptance of the yoke of
Japan without bloodshed or difficulty.

The Formosans were represented as having wor-
shipped the heavenly bodies till two philosophers
appeared, who bade them turn from this worship to
86 LITERARY FORGERIES

that of one Supreme God. To Him they were
bidden to raise a temple, and on an altar therein
to burn the hearts of 20,000 boys under the age of
nine. The indignant Formosans pursued these philo-
sophers into a desert, but their persecution of them
being avenged by eclipses, storms and earthquakes,
the Formosans became penitent, and accepted a
prophet, by name Psalmanazar, or “the author of
peace,” so called because he was to declare a new
peace between the Deity and the Formosans. In
the book this other Psalmanazar plays the part as-
signed to Moses in the Old Testament, as the
mouthpiece of the Divine commands. Most striking
of these was the command that on a given annual
festival 18,000 boys under nine should have their
hearts burnt upon an altar. This festival was the
anniversary of the day on which the Deity first ap-
peared in the tabernacle in the form of an ox, when
for nine days in succession 2,000 children were thus
sacrificed daily. Mexico itself never offered a picture
more horrible than the function of slaughtering these
children assigned to the Chief Sacrificator. And
whilst on common days the heavenly bodies were
to continue to be worshippéd and to be honoured
by the sacrifices of beasts, it was only the Deity
who, in addition to the tribute of beasts, was to be
honoured with the tribute of children.

To overcome the difficulty of the depopulation
consequent on such a system of religion the author
made the Formosans polygamous, and the privilege
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 87

of primogeniture in the island extended for the eldest
son to exemption from that liability to sacrifice which
was the possible portion of all younger sons.  Psal-
manazar, the author, was as bold as his namesake,
the prophet ; the assumed credulity of the British
reader being fully as remarkable as the docility of
the Formosan parent. He cared nothing for ex-
isting authentic accounts of Formosa; for why should
a real Formosan adjust his narrative to that of a
Dutch missionary like George Candidius? If Can-
didius had confined the sacrifices of the Formosans
to such offerings as rice and fruits, that was all very
well; the British public needed stronger fare, and
would be pleased with nothing short of 18,000
infants annually.

Psalmanazar admits that he deliberately made
his description to clash in most particulars with the
accounts of previous writers. Therefore on almost
every point he contradicted Candidius. The Dutch
writer had said that begging was very prevalent on
the island; Psalmanazar denied that the poor were
suffered to beg at all, and declared that each precinct
or village had its own poorhouse. Candidius had
said that there was no regular government in the
island, but that at most each village was governed
by twelve men of the same age, not under forty ;
Psalmanazar declared for an elaborate hierarchy of
ministers, of whose very dress he described and de-
picted the minutest details. Candidius had described
the laws asso lenient as to be almost non-existent ;
88 LITERARY FORGERIES

robbery was barely punished at all, and a present of
a few hogs was ample compensation for murder. or
adultery. According to Psalmanazar, robbers and
murderers were hanged head downwards and shot to
death with arrows, whilst other offences entailed
burning alive, the cutting off of legs and arms, tear-
ing in pieces by dogs, or the boring of the tongue
with a hot iron. Psalmanazar had much to say of
priests; Candidius only admitted the existence of
priestesses.

Candidius also had denied the existence of gold
or silver mines in the country; Psalmanazar made
“the great quantity of gold and silver” the Formo-
sans’ chief source of profit, and located three gold
and three silver mines in the several islands. Nor
was this enough for British consumption, for “ their
temples and houses were often covered with gold,
both in cities and villages”. Free fancy may as well
be magnificent as mean, and in keeping with these
village houses of gold was the Viceroy’s Palace,
“three English miles in circumference”.

Who could disbelieve so circumstantial a writer,
capable of describing with accuracy the dress of
every class in the community and of supplementing
such description with woodcut illustrations? And
the writer went on the principle that, the more in-
credible a thing was, the stronger was its title to
credit. Accordingly the Formosans were said to
look upon serpents as affording ‘“‘very good meat
and very savoury”; but how did they extract the
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 89

poison? Catching the serpents alive, they would
irritate them by beating them with rods; the con-
sequent furious passion of the serpent would cause
all its venom to ascend to its head, so that when
this part of the body was cut off there would be no
poison left in the remainder. The Formosans also
carried familiar serpents about their bodies, and kept
toads in their houses to purify them of infection.

Psalmanazar peopled Formosa with elephants,
rhinoceroses, camels and sea-horses, “ all which were
tame, and very useful for the service of man”.
Elephants were used for drawing carts or litters, and
were guided by drivers sitting on their trunks,
Besides these animals were such beasts as lions,
boars, wolves, leopards, apes, tigers, crocodiles and
wild bulls. But the Formosans knew nothing of
dragons or land-unicorns, and disbelieved in the very
existence of griphons. No one seems in those days
to have thought of criticising the author’s zoology,
which could not have been more wildly removed
from the truth. For, though the zoology of Formosa
is still to define with accuracy, Dr. MacKay, for
twenty-three years a missionary in Formosa, only
cites among the mammalia of the country such
creatures as wild boars, rats, monkeys, squirrels,
goats, deer, bears, ant-eaters, leopards and tiger-cats.
(from Far Formosa, 1896, 76.)

More wonderful even than the description of
Formosa were the drawings in illustration. There
was the temple, with the altar and gridiron whereon
990 LITERARY FORGERIES

the children’s hearts were burnt; the different altars
to the sun, moon and stars; the funeral processions ;
the dresses of every class and kind from the king
and queen downwards to a country woman or a
country bumpkin; the floating villages; the coins
with their names; and above all the marvellous
alphabet of twenty letters, with the names of some
of them, like Lamdo and epsi, for “1” and “e,”’ so
strangely similar to the Greek Lambda and epsilon.
But then they taught the Greek tongue in the
academies of Formosa! Asa sample of the Formo-
san language the author printed the Lord’s Prayer,
the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments
in Formosan words, but in Roman characters.

It seems incredible that so many of our ancestors
should have been the dupes of all this. But from
the first Psalmanazar had certain sceptics to deal
with. Father Fontenay, the Jesuit, had been for
eighteen years a missionary in Formosa, and he
pointed out that Formosa was a dependency of
China, not of Japan, as Psalmanazar declared ;
whilst Dr. Halley, the astronomer, asked the writer
some unanswerable questions. Still the book had
so large a sale that a second edition was published
the year following, in 1705. The preface to this
edition takes the highest rank in the annals of
mendacity. Psalmanazar boldly therein replies to
twenty-five objections “of the first magnitude”
which had been raised by various critics against
the statements in the first edition. On no point
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN g1

would he give way. At most he would say about
the annual sacrifice of the 18,000 boys that
such was the number laid down by the law; in
practice the law might be evaded. As for the
“forgeries” of Candidius, why should they be be-
lieved against the word of a native? What Candidius
had said regarding maternity in Formosa was not a
whit more credible than what he had said regarding
the sacrifices (and this was true enough); and as to
his differences from Candidius, what could more com-
pletely prove his own veracity ? For surely a forger
would have taken care that his statements should
conform to those of previous writers. This preface
of monumental audacity bears the date of the 12th of
June, 1705.

The secret of Psalmanazar’s success lay in the
fact that he not only tickled that love for the marvel-
lous in the British people, of which in recent times
there has been a similar illustration in the adventures
of De Rougemont, but also pandered to the strong
feeling against the Jesuits then prevalent in England.
He concluded his amazing Description with a sketch
of the history of the Jesuits’ mission to Japan, a
sketch which fairly coincided with the real facts and
which he made the vehicle of a strong attack upon
that society, whose pupil he had been in earlier
years. He adduced the great persecution of the
Christians in Japan as showing “how great a preju-
dice the Jesuits had done to Christianity, and what
a reproach and disgrace they had brought upon the
92 LITERARY FORGERIES

Christian name, by imposing their Popish errors upon
the people as necessary articles of faith”. This and
much more of the same sort was highly palatable to
the British taste, and for many years this anti-Jesuit
Formosan proselyte to the Church of England re-
mained an object of faith and charity to a consider-
able section of his adopted countrymen.

This made it difficult for Psalmanazar to clear
himself of the imposture, when he came to entertain
a genuine wish to set himself right with the public.
But a serious illness in 1728, and the accidental
reading of Law’s Sevzous Cadl?, are said to have van-
quished his irresolution, and he at once began the
composition of his Wemozrs, one of the most singular
books of confession ever written. He certainly took
his leisure over it, for it seems to have occupied him
for twenty-five years, It was finished before 1752,
when he made his first will with directions for its
posthumous publication, but it did not reach the
public till 1765. But long before that there had
been a semi-public recantation. To Bowen’s Com-
plete System of Geography, published in 1747 in
two large folio volumes, Psalmanazar contributed the
chapters on China and Japan, and therein he dealt
again with Formosa. One might suppose, he says,
that Formosa had some peculiar beauty, if the
account formerly given by a pretended native of it,
called Psalmanazar, had had any truth in it. But
that author, who was still in England, had long
since owned the contrary ; respect for those whom
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 93

such an avowal might have injured alone prevented
a public retraction; they being now dead, he gave
the publishers leave to assure the world that the
greater part of that account had been fabulous, and
that he designed to leave behind him to be published
after his death a “faithful account of that unhappy
step”. He then proceeded to give an account of
Formosa, avowedly from Candidius, with whose
account some forty years before he had deliberately
made his own to clash! No wonder Formosa was
a subject his friends avoided. Even Dr. Johnson
avowed himself afraid of mentioning so much as
China in the presence of the once-reputed Formosan.

Psalmanazar’s repentance for his fraud amounted
to remorse, and his self-humiliation bordered on the
abject. Henceforth he would pay by voluntary
self-effacement and obscurity for his earlier and
wicked love for notoriety. His literary contributions
should not betray his name. If he writes a most
meritorious /Zzstory of Printing for Palmer, the
printer, it is published under Palmer’s name as the
author. If he publishes (1753) five Essays on
Miracles, the work is attributed on the title-page to
“an obscure layman in town”. This is in keeping
with his curious will, prefixed to his Wemozrs, which
directs that his body may be buried in some obscure
corner of the common burying-ground, and uninclosed
in any kind of coffin, save a shell of the lowest
value, without lid or other covering to hinder the
natural earth from entirely surrounding it.
94 LITERARY FORGERIES

Psalmanazar only obtained ten guineas for the
first edition of his Formosa, and twelve for the
second. Except for its fabulous nature, it is a work
of far less interest than the Memozrs, which purports
to be pure autobiography with nothing fabulous
about it at all. It unfolds, however, an amazing
story of real life that puts a severe strain on belief.
The narrative seems to centre round Avignon, and
therefore to justify the assumption of a French origin.
But, as Psalmanazar declares that he “never met
with, nor heard of any one, that ever guessed right,
or anything near it, with respect to my native country,”
France seems to be excluded from the category of
probable claimants to the honour of having produced
him.

Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans may boast
of having had each a share in the education of this
extraordinary youth. And between them they
taught him Latin to some effect, and something of
theology. Then comes, at about the age of sixteen,
a period of idleness, ending in a condition of beggary,
in which condition he tramps about Europe, from
his mother living somewhere apparently in France
to his father living “some hundreds of miles from
her” ; a mysterious father who had seen the greatest
part of Europe, could give an extraordinary account
of it, and who understood several of its languages,
but who lived in a poor house in an obscure village.
Posing first as an Irishman persecuted for his religion,
and then as a Formosan converted by the Jesuits
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 95

to Christianity and by them conveyed to Avignon,
he wanders on foot about Europe, relieving a
miserable state of destitution by the alms of the
charitable or the credulous. From that condition
he passes into military service, and is speedily in-
volved in the lowest depths of moral degradation,
inseparable from that condition, but always passing
as a Formosan, fond of theological arguments, and
making an affectation of worshipping the rising or the
setting sun. About two years so pass, during which,
though war is raging, he sees nothing of any battle
or siege, till he meets with Innes, who prevails on
him to be baptised as George Lauder, and to ac-
company him to London to be introduced to its
bishop.

Then follows the triumphant fraud, for so it
must be accounted, although Psalmanazar himself
admits that his ‘fabulous account was as much dis-
credited by the greatest part of the world as ever”.
He is sent to Christ Church, he is courted in society,
his book sells like wildfire. It is wonderful how a
youth of twenty, pretending to be twenty-five, could
sustain the part. After six months at Oxford he re-
turns to his lodgings in Pall Mall, finds Innes flown
and promoted, and brings out his second edition.
From this time (1705) he confesses to ten or a dozen
years ‘“‘misspent in a course of the most shameless
idleness, vanity and extravagance,” ending in 1715
by his becoming clerk to a Lancashire regiment,
his supposed Formosan nationality still procuring
96 LITERARY FORGERIES

him easy access among “persons of rank and learn-
ing”. After two years thus pleasantly spent with
the regiment, passing under the nickname of “Sir
George,” as knighted by Queen Anne after the
Peace of Utrecht, he tries to win a competence
from fan-painting, but, that failing, a friendly
clergyman raises an annual subscription for him,
as a Formosan proselyte, of between twenty and
thirty pounds a year, which large sum, together
with a trifle from tuition, affords him “a comfortable
competency ”.

Then he falls across a printer, and is set to the
translating of books, From this time he leads a life
as regular and studious as it had formerly been the
reverse. His translations bring him “a comfortable
living”. He claims to have taught himself Hebrew
with such success as to be able to talk it and even
to compose in it. He works hard at his share of the
Universal Fistory or of Bowen’s Complete System of
Geography ; and at such literary studies he labours
happily and easily for the latter and longer part of
his existence, attributing to a small nightly dose of
laudanum his ability to work from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M.
with “a good appetite and digestion, a clear head,
and tolerable flow of spirits”. And so a life that
started on a fair course to the tree at Tyburn ends
with the esteem of all men and the friendship of
Dr. Johnson. But who Psalmanazar really was, who
were his parents, and what was his country, are
questions which still remain to baffle the researches
PSALMANAZAR: THE FAMOUS FORMOSAN 97

of the wise or the curious. His life affords a singular
instance of a career that was almost criminal being
converted by determined effort into the straighter
paths of industry. There are many worse texts for
a good sermon than the life of Psalmanazar.
CHAPTER VI.
POLITICAL FORGERY: THE Z/KON BASILIKE.

Times of great political excitement are prolific of
much false literature, and the temptation to direct
the course of events has at different times flooded
the world with spurious writings, often with a distinct
effect on the course of history. The crowning in-
stance of a work of this nature is the famous Zzkon
Bastliké, which, appearing shortly after the execution
of Charles I. as his work, contributed greatly to that
reaction in his favour which in a few years culminated
in the Restoration of Charles I]. It may be doubted
whether any book in the world’s history ever had so
decisive an effect on the tide of events. Burnet de-
scribes it as having enjoyed “the greatest run in
many impressions” of any book of the age, and it
was translated into many languages.

Yet it is evident that from its first appearance
there were grave doubts as to the king’s authorship
of it. Zhe Princely Pelican (1649) refers to con-
temporary reports that it was written by one of his
chaplains, “to beget an esteem of learning and piety
in his master as likewise to allay the rigour of the

approaching sentence at Westminster”. This may
98
POLITICAL FORGERY 99

possibly have been the motive of its real author, John
Gauden, then vicar of Bocking, in Essex, who, after
he had been made Bishop of Exeter in 1660, laid a
most unqualified claim to its authorship. It has been
the fashion amongst Royalist writers to treat this claim
as a pure lie on Gauden’s part, and to support such
an hypothesis by unmeasured abuse (for which there
is no real foundation) of Gauden’s moral character.
Wood describes Gauden as “‘a very comely person,
a man of vast parts”; and to call him, as Mr. Almach
does, ‘a cowering, craving, conceited, mean-spirited
creature,” does not dispose of his claim to the author-
ship of the Ezkox.

Into the vexed question of the external evidence
in favour of Charles’ authorship it is needless to
enter, for, even if this were much stronger than it
has ever been shown to be, it would be entirely over-
borne by the force of the internal evidence, which is
overwhelmingly in favour of Gauden. A man can
no more escape from his style than he can from his
shadow, and so many of the literary mannerisms which
distinguish the Azo distinguish also the works of
Gauden but not those of Charles, that all doubt about
the authorship seems removed by an impartial com-
parison.

To diminish the force of such tell-tale phrases as
show an intimate literary affinity between the Ezkon
and Gauden, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Master
of Trinity College, Cambridge, the great champion

of Charles, resorted to the theory that Gauden, re-
7 *
100 LITERARY FORGERIES

solving shortly before the Restoration to claim the
£ikon as his own with a view to obtain preferment,
took care that his writings “subsequent to that in-
tention should be so conformed as to render his claim
the more plausible” (Who Wrote “ Ezkon Basthké” ?
iii., 111, 1824). But how can such a theory meet the
case of the Azeraspistes, published in 1653, when
no magic crystal could have foreshown the Restora-
tion seven years afterwards? Or why should such
phrases occur in Gauden’s Manual of Prayer, a
work of private devotions, which was designed for no
other eyes than those of John Earle, Esquire, to whom
it is dedicated, and which has never emerged from
its manuscript stage in the Library at Lambeth?
Or how account for such imitations of the #z£ox in
Gauden’s Religious and Loyal Protestation of 1648 or
in his four printed sermons of 1640 and 1641, when
the Ezkon did not see the light till 1649? There
can be no question of borrowing here.

And if Charles’ mind was the real source of such
phrases as are common both to the Az&on and to
Gauden, some indications of them should appear in
the letters and other literary expressions of the royal
mind, instead of being, as they are, remarkable either
for their rarity or their entire absence.

With many of such phrases in common Words-
worth fenced with fair success. Those now adduced
have for the most part escaped the notice of Arch-
deacon Todd and other believers in Gauden. They
have of course a cumulative value, the case resting
POLITICAL FORGERY IOI

on a series of instances, not on single instances.
Wordsworth’s plan was to take a particular word or
phrase, and to show that it occurred in some previous
or contemporary writer as well as in the ZzZox and in
Gauden. But this does not settle the question. For
the significant fact remains that these coincidences of
diction occur precisely in the writer who claims the
authorship of the Zzon, and with such frequency as
to give a distinct tone to his style. It is the number
of such coincidences that make it almost certain,
apart from all other arguments, that Gauden and the
author of the zon were one and the same person.

Gauden’s fondness for metaphors amounted to a
literary vice. They are drawn from every conceiv-
able side of life, are often far-fetched, and worked
out with wearisome elaboration. The remarkable
thing is that most of the metaphors of the Zz£on are
identical with those which lend so peculiar a colour
to Gauden’s style. Gauden’s metaphors may con-
veniently be classified under the categories of meta-
phors: (1) Maritime or Nautical, (2) Military, (3)
Metallurgical, (4) Medical, (5) Horticultural, (6)
Geometrical, (7) Igneous.

1. Maritime or nautical metaphors are among the
most frequent in the Zzkon. The author is full of
the sea and storms, of helms and pilots, of ports and
shipwrecks. ‘Lord, be Thou my pilot,” he exclaims,
‘‘in this dark and dangerous storm, which neither
admits my return to the port whence I set out, nor
my making any other.” Again: “If a pilot at sea
102 LITERARY FORGERIES

cannot see the polestar, it can be no fault in him to
steer his course by such stars as do best appear to
him”. Or again: “Nor do I wish other than the
safe bringing of the ship to shore, when they have
cast me overboard: though it be very strange that
mariners can find no other means to appease the
storm themselves have raised but by drowning their
pilot”.

So common a metaphor is not of course unknown
to Charles, who regards the events of his time as a
“‘great storm” or ‘deluge,’ and once alludes to
himself as ‘ Him that sits at the helm” (Declaration,
14th April, 1628). But the king uses such figures
infrequently and in their simplest form, whereas with
Gauden the use of them is unfailing and generally
elaborate. He can hardly think of the State or the
Church but as a ship, of which statesmen or bishops
are the pilots. Let the following suffice as samples
from the zervaspistes : “These rustic and rash under-
takers to reform and control all are only probable to
shipwreck themselves, and many others, and the
whole ship of this Church by driving the skilful pilots
(the true bishops and ministers) from the helm, and
putting in their place every bold boatswain” (114).
Or: “Wise pilots know there is no pcint in the
compass whence a tempest may not come” (117),
Again: “Nor ought poor men... to drive, like
tipsy mariners, those rightful pilots from the helm

. that these new undertakers may try . . . how
soon they can overwhelm or overcast so fair, rich
POLITICAL FORGERY 103

and goodly vessel as this Church of England once
was in the eye of all the world but our own” (129).

Similar metaphors occur in pages 31, 92, 171,
209, 526, 548 and 576. And lest it be said that
Gauden acquired this literary habit from reading the
Evzkon, \et it be remembered that in his first pub-
lished sermon of 1640, long before the Ezfon was
thought of, he spoke of that “great cable which holds
the State from shipwreck”.

There would seem to be in the Zzkox no metaphor
relating to the sea which is not also in Gauden.
If the Zzkon remarks that it is better to be forced by
sea to a storm than to venture “splitting or sinking
on a lee shore,’ Gauden is not far behind when he
speaks of ministers ‘‘whom for the most part neces-
sity drives into this port of the ministry, and there
keeps them so under hatches or ox the /ee that they
are seldom able to adventure,” etc, (/Zps., 497).

Gauden bids princes and governors “set banks
and boundaries” to the common people ‘‘as to great
waters” (/Zs., 117); he speaks of “those to whose
rage, as to seas, the Lord hath hitherto set bounds”
(26., 33); “which were never wont to overflow the
constant banks of the divinely established calling of
the Ministry, but still were kept within those holy
and humble bounds” (220). He cannot get his
mind away from overflowing seas: “As the sea by
modest lickings and slidings over the daxks which
afterwards its fury overbears with horrible inunda-
tions”. The habit might not be worth remarking but
104 LITERARY FORGERIES

for the manifestation of the same habit by the author
of the Az#on, who exclaims: ‘‘ Thou canst soon cause
the overflowing seas to ebb, and retire back again to
the bounds which Thou hast appointed them,” and
who complains of “these popular inundations which
Thou permittest to overbear all the danks of loyalty
and modesty”. It is visible at a glance how both
writers dress identically the same thought in identi-
cally the same words; as we should expect them to
do if Gauden wrote for the king.

2. Military metaphors furnish another category
which displays the same correspondence between the
thought and words of Gauden and of Charles.

Foul and false aspersions, says Charles, ‘ were
secret engines at first employed against my people’s
love of me, that, wxdermining their opinion and value
of me, my enemies, and theirs too, might at once blow
up their affections and batter down their loyalty”.
Or again: “where many exgznes of religious and fair
pretensions are brought chiefly to da¢ter or ease epis-
copacy ”,

Gauden comes very near this when he compares
persecutions to ‘“‘the Devil’s engines ¢o batter or
undermine the Church of Christ” (462), or complains
that “there are now not only secret underminings but
open engines” (34).

The real Charles once speaks of a Parliamentary
measure as an “ engine” (Baszlzka, ii., 152), and refers
to his enemies as undermining a wall and shaking
foundations (24., ii., 137), but these can hardly weigh
POLITICAL FORGERY 105

against the remarkable antithesis between the “secret
engines ” of the Zzkon and the “ open engines” of the
Flreraspistes, Nor can it be thought that Gauden
borrowed the metaphor from Charles, for in his ser-
mon of 1640 we find him saying : “‘ There is no engzne
you can invent so effectual to datter down and de-
molish the adverse party ” (24); which shows a fond-
ness for these words long prior to the appearance of
the Ezkon.

Under this head of military metaphors the Zzkon’s
allusion to “the forked arrow of factious emulation ”
may be compared with Gauden’s phrase, ‘‘ Another
great calamity... isasa forked arrow” (fps., 321),
or “carrying with them in their festered consciences
the forked arrow,” etc. (Bloody Slaughter-house, 51).

3. Metallurgical metaphors afford another closely
connecting link between Charles and Gauden, Out
of four allusions to furnaces in the Zzkoz one may be
quoted: ‘“‘ Never were princes more glorious than
those whom God hath suffered to be tried in the
Surnace of affirction” ; with which may be compared
this from Gauden: “ Nor shall this furnace of affitc-
tion be to consume this Reformed Church, but only
to purge her,” etc. (//fs., 99) ; or again: ““ When they
are red-hot in the forge of affliction, and hammered
on the anvils of the world’s malice” (390).

Or compare the words of the /zkon, “ bring us at
last more refined out of these fires,” with such a
passage in Gauden’s Prayer Manual as ‘make Thy
Church and faithful servants, both ministers and
106 LITERARY FORGERIES

people, even to be as Thy gold, in Thy furnace, not
less precious to Thee, but more fitted, because move
refined for Thy service” ; or with the passage in the
Hlieraspistes where Gauden writes of the Deity as
‘casting His gold into the hottest furnace to make it
at once more pure in itself and more precious to
Himself” (561).

And here is another tell-tale metaphor derived

from smelting. “Some men thought,” says the
Fitkon, “that the Government of this Church and
State . . . would not run into therr new moulds till

they had first me/ted it in the fire of a civil war”.
Gauden had a special love for this phrase. ‘‘ Nothing

more easily runs into new moulds ... than many
ministers do” (//ps., 521); “Is he angry that
preachers .. . are not presently me/ted with every

popular glowing heat of seeming piety? and that
they run znto any mould,” etc. (222). And again he
refers to the “hotter medtengs of any bolder Inde-
pendents who made religion and reformation run to
any new moulds which they fancy” (/7ps., Pref., 3).
And references to pages 417, 522, 578, 587, will
further show how essential a part of Gauden’s mental
furniture was this resort to metallurgical metaphors,
which are altogether foreign to the mind of Charles.

4. Medical metaphors abound of course in all
writers, and even in the writings of Charles diseases
and distempers, cures and physicians, play their
natural part. But in Gauden such metaphors are so
frequent as to disfigure his style. They are also of
POLITICAL FORGERY 107

wearisome frequency in the £zon; but it is the
perpetual antithesis between fozson and antidote
which is so striking a common feature of both Gauden
and the author of the Zzkon,

From many passages in Gauden the following
may suffice as illustrations: “As good laws oft rise
by the occasion of evil manners, like axtzdotes from
powsons” (FHps., 209); or from the Prayer Manual:
“Give me... the antidote of charity against the
poison of other injuries”. In a similar way the
Ltkon: “ As our sins have turned our antidotes into
Pozsons, so let Thy grace turn our Zozsons into anttz-
dotes” ; or again: ‘Let mine and other men’s con-
stancy be an antzdote against the pozson of their
example”. Charles uses the word “antidote” three
times in his undoubted works, but never in contrast
with “poison,” as was the habit of Gauden.

5. Horticultural metaphors form another distinc-
tive feature of Gauden’s style, and more especially the
Pauline metaphor of “ planting and watering”. The
following are but a few instances out of many. In
his sermon of 29th November, 1640, he asks: ‘‘ Have
we so long been a vine planted and watered and
fenced?” In his Prayer Manual: ‘“ Restore Thy
Church . . . which heretofore so happily planéed,
watered, and preserved,” etc. In the Wzeraspistes :
‘Ministers . . . who may be always either planting,
or watering, or pruning” (185); ‘‘fair flowers of
Christ's planting and watering” (112); “ whose stock
first planted and watered in the universities” (386).
108 LITERARY FORGERIES

And in his Cromwell’s Bloody Slaughter-house,
written in February, 1649, we again find the phrase
“watered with the blood of the King and his subjects ”
(104).

Of course any writer was free to use the phrase,
but Charles never uses it: which fact makes its re-
currence in the Zzon highly significant. “If Pres-
bytery in such a supremacy be an institution of Christ,
sure it differs from all others, and is the first and only
point of Christianity which was to be planted and
watered with so much Christian blood.” Or again:
“Thy vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted
and the dew of heaven watered to a happy and
flourishing estate”. Gauden’s expression “ plenti-
fully watered with the dew of heaven” (fHps., 386)
throws light on this last passage as well as on the
following in the Azfoz: “ All ministers will find as
great a difference in point of thriving between the
favour of the People and of Princes, as plants do be-
tween being watered by hand, or by the sweet and
liberal dews of Heaven”.

How can all these resemblances be better ac-
counted for than by the theory that they were all
written by Gauden ?

6. The author of the Zzkoxz had also a special love
for geometrical metaphors. Circles, centres and lines
had for him an unfailing attraction. Thus he writes
of “notions which go rather in and round a circle of
fancy than ina right fine of reason tending to the
law, the only centre of public consistency ” ; he notices
POLITICAL FORGERY 109

how impossible it is “for lines to be drawn from the
centre, and not to divide from each other, so much
the wider, by how much they go farther from the
point of union”; and he trusts, for the Prince of
Wales, that to the “centre of true happiness (z.¢., his
salvation) God hath and will graciously direct those
black lines of affliction, which he hath pleased to draw
on himself”.

In the reported conference at Raglan Castle be-
tween Charles and the Marquis of Worcester the
King is made to speak of the Greek Church as the
“centre and circumference” of the Catholic Church,
and he once speaks of a “circle of order” (LzbLotheca
Regia, i., 100); but this amounts to very little. The
metaphor is not part and parcel of his style, as it is of
Gauden’s. Compare with the above passages from
the Zzkox the following from the Hzeraspestes :—

“All gifts... of God’s spirit... are in all
motions, habits, and operations as conform to the
Scriptures as any vzght fine is to that rule by which
it is drawn” (327).

“So far are those lines which the anti-ministerial
fury and folly draws from moving parallel to piety or
Christianity ... that they are most diametrically
opposite to all civility” (Pref, 33). Christians are
“Zines drawn from several points of faith’s circumfer-
ence, yet to the same centre, Jesus Christ” (455).

And lest it be said that Gauden caught this love
for geometry from the Ezkon, the sermon he preached
before Parliament on 29th November, 1640, may again
110 LITERARY FORGERIES

be quoted to show that Gauden had acquired the
habit of thinking in terms of geometry long before
there was an zon to imitate. ‘‘ Truth is but one,
as the centre,” he says, “and draws all minds to an
, unity which tends to it” (41).

7. But it is the metaphor igneous that more con-
clusively than all others establishes the identity of
Gauden and the author of the FAzkox. Gauden’s
pages fairly scintillate with “sparks” and “flames”
and ‘“‘fires,” just as also scintillate the pages of the
Lvkon, but not the pages of the genuine Charles.

As samples of this habit the following may be
quoted from the Ezzon :—

“What flames of discontent this spark soon kindled
all the world is witness.”

‘The brands of that fire, being ill quenched, have
kindled the like flames here.”

“In whose hearts they seek by all means to
smother and extinguish all sparks of love, respect
and loyalty to me.”

“Not the least incentive that kindled and blew
up into those horrid flames the sparks of discontent.”

These are only a few instances of a habit which
gives a distinct colouring to the Zzkon. It is there-
fore significant that precisely the same colouring is
given to all Gauden’s works by his constant resort to
the same metaphor. Here are a few illustrations :—

“The sparks of many men’s passionate opinions

. at last lighting upon thatched houses. . . have
set their own houses on fire” (/Zs., 33).
POLITICAL FORGERY III

“‘ How fain would some that the sun were set that
their glow-worms might shine ; that the light of the
house were extinguished ; that so their sparks might
appear which they have kindled to themselves” (/Zgs.,
396).

“Every novelty of fashion in religion. . . puts
out Thy sacred sparks and embers in Christian hearts,
yea, and kindles those unholy. . . fires of contrariety,
jealousy, . . . to so great heights of all-devouring
flames,” etc. (AZps., 133).

These are from Gauden’s Lz/e of Hooker (1661):—

“They conspired to kindle those horrid fires of
civil war which this wise author foresaw and foretold
in his admirable preface which follow those sparks
and that smoke which he saw rise in his days” (see
‘‘horrid flames” in Evkon, 12).

“Tf by any means he might extinguish those fires
whose smokings he already felt and whose flames he
feared would at last break out to dreadful conflagra-
tions.”

In the sermons, too, which he preached long before
the Zzkox was written, there is the same unfailing
love for the igneous metaphor :—

“Like powder we kindle upon the least spark of
offence and instantly flame to revenge” (Oxford, 11th
July, 1641).

“Where the coals of private dissensions are scat-
tered in every corner, the whole house will soon be
on fire” (Chelmsford, 1641).

If we now turn from categories of corresponding
112 LITERARY FORGERIES

metaphors in the Zzéoz and in Gauden, and take
single metaphors, the same amazing affinity is ever
before us.

There is that metaphor from archery in the curi-
ous phrase of the Zzkox: “A great part of whose
piety Lung upon that popular pin of railing against
and condemning the Government”. Gauden supplies
a similar passage: “The weight of Christianity doth
not at all hang on this popular pin,” etc. (FTps., 116).

Sometimes the metaphor is from bowls. Com-
pare in the Az£ox ‘that nothing of passion shall have
any dzas upon my gudgment” with Gauden’s “that par-
tial dzas on thety gudgment which shall mar all their
learning” (/7/s., 287).

Sometimes the metaphor is from tennis. Says
the Ezkon : “ People’s rebounds are oft in their faces,
who first put them on those violent strokes”. Gauden
writes : ‘I have done with the first part of this cavil
or calumny which seeks to bandy the Church of Eng-
land against the Papal or Romish wa//; that they
may make it either rebound to a popular or Indepen-
dent side, or else fall into the Lazard of having no
true Christian ministry at all” (/74s., 259).

Poultry-rearing supplies the author of the Ezkon
with ‘“‘pvoud and arrogant activity which seeks to
hatch every egg of different opzuzous to a faction or
schism”. And it is Gauden who writes: ‘“ How
lothe are vain and proud men to think the egg of
any ofenzons which they have laid or hatched to
be addled” (505).
POLITICAL FORGERY 113

Always in the £z£on and in Gauden this strange
use of the same thought in the same words. If the
Etkon speaks of ‘the differences in lesser matters
which are but the skirts and suburbs of religion,” it is
Gauden who supplies the parallel: “ If in lesser things
which are but the lace and fringe of the holy vestment,
the verge and suburbs of religion” (Hps., 453), and
who writes in his Prayer Manual of “the suburbs of
hell”.

The £zkon has it: “My prayer to God is...
that He would be pleased to make you an axchor or
harbour rather to these ¢ossed and weather-beaten
kingdoms” ; and Gauden writes: “Christians must
not always be Zossemg to and fro in religion, but come
to an anchor of fixation” (/7ps., 452).

The £zox is fond of such a figure as “to see thes
sin tm the glass of their punishment”; with which
compare in Gauden’s Religious and Loyal Protesta-
tion of 5th January, 1649: “I would rather you
should see your sins im such glasses of free and fair
remonstrance”. Or compare from the E&vzkon:
‘“‘Make our sins appear to our consciences as they
are represented in the glass of Thy judgments,”
with Gauden’s description of human affairs as “ most
fully represented in the glass of our times” (/Zps.,
528).

“ Forgive their sins . . . who have deserved Thy
just punishment thus to let in the w/d doar .. . to
waste and deform Thy vineyard”. So the Ezkon;

and so Gauden writes of certain persons who “like
8
114 LITERARY FORGERIES

so many wz/d boars sought to lay waste the Lord's
vineyara” (LfTps., 54).

Gauden loved these comparisons of men with
animals. He writes of those “swzze which . . . root
up the pastures, break through the fences and waste
the corn” (/Z/fs., 457), and so the Azzon: “As swine
are to gardens and orderly plantations, so are tumults
to Parliaments”.

There is the phrase in the Zzfon.: “The tuition
of kings and queens which have been xursing
Sathers and mothers of this Church,” and Gauden has :
“This Church which by the princely piety of xursing
Jathers and mothers hath been so long preserved”
(Z7ps., 99). The phrase is from Isaiah xlix. 23.

The zfon has a metaphor from carpentry :
‘‘Nor is it so proper to ew out religious reforma-
tions by the sword as to fofsh them by fair and re-
ligious disputations”. And so Gauden says of the
Schoolmen that they rather “ewed and cut the
pillars of Christian religion into small chips and
shavings than added much to the folzshzng and estab-
lishing of them” (AZfs., 401).

The best explanation of all these resemblances of
phrase is the unity of the mind that produced them.
Dr. Wordsworth had a simple theory for disposing
of them: if they occurred in a work by Gauden of
later date than the #zon, then they were derived
from the Zzkon ; if they occurred in a work of earlier
date than the Zzfon, then Charles, a great reader
of sermons, had derived them from the sermons of
POLITICAL FORGERY 115

Gauden. But this is special pleading of the com-
monest sort, which can convince no one. Dr.
Wordsworth’s theory was that Gauden intentionally
copied the Zzkon in order to press his claim to its
authorship with more plausibility, But in Gauden’s
claim, made to Lord Clarendon, there is no reference
to such coincidences as proof of such authorship, and it
is idle to think of a man writing a long book like the
Ffreraspistes on the chance of its supporting a claim
not to be made till seven years afterwards, and then
only on the chance of a complete political revolution.
And is it not ridiculous to think of a man of affairs
like the Chancellor wading through all Gauden’s volu-
minous works in order to convince himself that
Gauden’s claim was a veracious one? Lord Clarendon
of course knew that it was true on other grounds,
and never controverted it.

But besides sameness of metaphors, there are
certain favourite phrases and antitheses which further
establish the truth of Gauden’s claim.

1. The antithesis between the ‘“‘just” and the
“unjust ”.

In the Zzéon we have, “whose just recovery of
their rights from #zjust usurpations,” or, “ which his
justice by the very unjust hands of some of my sub-
jects”. Charles in a letter to the queen (14th Nov.,
1646) alludes to the “wajust justice” of Parliament,
but Gauden comes nearer to the zon with his
“that which you call 7us¢zce against the King seems

to me the greatest and most unparalleled zujustzce”
8 *
116 LITERARY FORGERIES

(Religious Protestation, 1649), or “the unjust exe-
cutioners of the jus¢ vengeance ” (Slaughter-house, 9),
or “a new court of justzce (as men unjustly term it)”
(20., 24).

2. The antithesis between “intend” and “ pre-
tend”. The zon has: “ How they keep their
covenants in point of piety pretended, provided they
adhere firmly to the party and design zxtended”.
So Gauden to Lord Fairfax and the General Council
of War in his Relzgious and Loyal Protestation of
5th January, 1649: “Let not the world find in the
event that your pretended mercies were zntended
cruelties ”.

3. The antithesis between “ word” and “sword”.
The Zzkon has a special love for playing off these
words against each other. “In vain is my person
excepted by a parenthesis of words when so many
hands are armed against me with swords.”

Again: ‘‘ Whose words were sometimes smoother
than oil, but now I see they would prove very
swords”,

Again: “ More glorious to convert souls to God’s
Church by the word than to conquer men to subjec-
tion by the sword”.

Or again: ‘“ Destroy myself by my word or not
suffer them to do it unresisted by the sword”.

Gauden has the same partiality for the same
antithesis :—

“Our words are sharp swords daily whetting or
clashing against each other” (/7/ps., 139); “soas the
POLITICAL FORGERY 117

ministry directs the magistracy by the word and the
magistracy assists the ministry by the sword” (Hps.,
400); “if arguments and words could not, yet arms
and swords have, they say, convinced the bishops”
(2d., 260).

4. The antithesis between “use” and ‘‘abuse”.

Not an uncommon antithesis, but again one which
happens to be a favourite both with Gauden and the
writer of the Ezkon. In the Ezkon we read: ‘Make
me so far happy as to make a right wse of others’
abuses”.

“To know how to sever between the use and
abuse of things.”

“The abuses of which deserve to be extirpated as
much as the use retained.”

From eight instances in the zeraspzstes may be
quoted :-—

“Least able to distinguish between the abuse and
use of things” (302).

“Much more folly it is quite to abolish the use of
holy things than to tolerate some abuses with it” (256).

“The soldiery might wse or rather aduse their
helmets ” (34).

And Gauden loved the antithesis long before the
Fkon, for in his sermon of 1640 he speaks of those
‘“‘who seek to aduse antiquity by wszng those names,”
etc,

5. The antithesis between “ending” and ‘“‘ mend-
ing,” which has recently become famous in a political
reference,
118 LITERARY FORGERIES

In the Zzkon we have: “I had the charity to in-
terpret that most part of my subjects. . . intended
to mend me, not to end me”. And so Gauden in the
Preface to his Wzeraspistes: “If it be the mending,
not the ending... of ministers which their severe
censurers and opposers seek for”.

6. The antithesis between “please” and “dis-
please ”.

From the Ezzon comes: “It is too much that
they have once overcome me, to please them by azs-
pleasing Thee”.

And: “If I may be happy to please Thee, I need
not fear whom I azsplease”.

Again it is Gauden who loves the same: “ It will
be hard to lease any one without azspleasing many ”
(Pref., AZps.).

“If they do but A/ease themselves, it matters not
how they adzsplease God” (505).

“To please myself in what I could not but think
very aispleaseng to Thee” (Manual of Prayer); and
‘“‘as may never make my pleasure Thy displeasure”
(26.).

7. The antithesis between “ piety” and “ policy”.

Though Fuller or others may use the same anti-
thesis, it is one that must be noticed as another liter-
ary link between Gauden and the Ezkox, Compare
in the Ezon “whom it most concerns doth in piety
and policy,” or “not so much out of Zzety as policy,”
with the following from Gauden : ‘a matter of policy

rather than piety ” (/7ps.,280) ; “rather a common act
POLITICAL FORGERY Ilg

of reason and folzty as men than proper to them as
Christians in pzety” (A/ps., 300); “no less necessity
both in prety and policy” (26., 233); “that human
policy may not overcome true pzety” (Manual); “how-
ever differing in some principles rather of podzty than
prety” (Letter to Bernard).

The case for Gauden is further strengthened by
reference to certain uncommon words or conjunction
of words. “The Independents,” says the £zkon,
“think themselves manumztted from their rivals’ ser-
vices.” So Gauden writes of novices in the ministry
‘‘which have but lately been manumuztted from the
rod and ferule” (/7/4s., 27).

“So slight and easy,” says the Ezfon, “is that
legerdemazin which will serve to delude the vulgar ” ;
and so Gauden talks of “those pretty /egerdemazns
in religion” (/Zps., 323).

The Zzkon speaks of the “perplexed labyrinths of
our own thoughts”. Gauden is fond of the word
“Jabyrinth,” and once writes of the “labyrinth. . .
of perplexed designs ” (Slaughter-house, 45).

“Ambitious minds never think they have laid
snares and gins enough,” says the Ezkon; “that so
none might discover his szares and gins,” says
Gauden (/7s., 395).

‘As showers do follow warm gleams,” has the
Ezkon; with which compare from Gauden: “ Yet
should these warmer gleams in ministers’ hearts rather
have vented themselves in soft dews and sweet showers
than in lightnings” (A/s., 25).
120 LITERARY FORGERIES

Connecting in the same way the £zkon with
Gauden is the use of such words as “smother and
overlay,” “rust and dross,” ‘“ many-headed hydra,”
“the itch of novelty,” “tumultuary violence,” ‘ touch-
stone,” “the light of reason and religion,” “prone,”
and the tiresome repetition of the expression ‘“ some
men”, Doubtless these expressions belonged. more
or less to the literary stock of the time, but the large
number of coincidences between the style of Gauden
and the author of the Zzon cannot be gainsaid, nor
easilyexplained away. Dr. Wordsworth asserted that
“no one ever had pointed out, or could point out, any
one sentence or word, tending in the slightest degree
to substantiate or warrant” Gauden’s claim; it can
only be replied that either his two perusals of the Hzer-
aspistes were inexcusably superficial or that they were
attended by a predetermination to find no evidence
that ran counter to a preconceived theory. The real
truth is that the Zzox is a sort of literary mosaic of
Gaudenian expressions, and that there is hardly a
thought in the Zz£ox that is foreign to Gauden.

And often this thought is clothed in the closest
possible similarity of words. Here, for instance, is a
passage from the Zzkon of which the italicised words-
deserve to be closely compared with a passage from
Gauden : “For those secu/ar additaments and orna-
ments of authority . . . which my predecessors. . .
have annexed to bishops and churchmen, I look upon
them but as just rewards of their learning, and piety

. meet strengthenings of their awthorzty and obser-
POLITICAL FORGERY 121

vance. . . . I would have such men bishops who are
most worthy of these excouragements.”

Gauden also writing of bishops, says: “I do not
much consider the secu/ar parade and equipage
further than as public excouragements of merit, as
excitations to excel, as noble rewards of learning, and
as extern decencies or solemnities which do much set
off and embroider authorzty in the sight of the vulgar ”
(/Zps., 274).

Again, the whole of Gauden’s long argument of
the proper relations between Episcopacy and Presby-
tery is identical with that of the Zzéon, One reason
Gauden gives for preferring Episcopacy is ‘“ the avoid-
ing of scandad-giving to so many Christian churches,
remaining in all the world : who, for the major part,
are still governed by bishops, in some respects dis-
tinct from and eminent above the presbyters: it is
not the work of Christian prudence or charity to
widen differences between us and other churches”
(Zps., 265). The £zkon uses many of the same words
to express the same thought: “Nor is it any point
of wisdom or charzty where Christians differ (as many
do in some parts) there to wzden the differences, and
at once to give the Christian world (except a handful
of some Protestants) so great a scandal in point of
Church government”.

Again, ‘“‘I should be glad,” says Gauden, “to
see the counseZ and assistance of well-settled presby-
ters crowned with the order and lustre of episcopal
presidency”. Says the Lvzkon, closely following :
122 LITERARY FORGERIES

“Not that Iam against the managing of this pre-
stdency and authority in one man by the joint counsel
and consent of many presbyters ”.

It would be tedious to quote more passages re-
vealing affinities which go deeper than the mere ex-
pression of ideas and touch the very ideas themselves.
For Wordsworth’s theory of Gauden’s moral and
spiritual incapacity to have written the Zzfon there
is not the smallest foundation, The Hzeraspzstes
abounds with passages not one whit spiritually inferior
to those of the zkon. There are passages in praise
of Charity, of Holiness, of Forgiveness not only equal
to anything in the Zzkox but strangely similar in tone.
Unhappily the scurrilous and the spiritual jostle one
another somewhat painfully in Gauden’s writings, but
it is unfair to collect these darker utterances as if they
stood alone, and then contrast them with the best
passages of the Azkon. Yet this simple trick of
controversy has been the favourite weapon of Charles’
partisans from Dr. Wordsworth to Mr, Almach.

Mr. Scott, in support of Charles, has quoted as
very similar to the terse and epigrammatic sentences
of the Azkon certain apophthegmata in Charles’ own
handwriting in his copy at the British Museum of
Bacon's Advancement of Learning ; as, for example,
“Temperance rewards a man when he least thinks
of it,” or ‘“‘ How can that be a virtue which is built
upon vice?” But the Hzeraspistes supplies abundant
and more applicable sentences, as ‘God oft hangs
great weights on little wires, and sets great wheels
POLITICAL FORGERY 123

on work by little springs” (37); “‘ Human disgraces
are oft the foils and whetstones of divers graces”
(565); ‘‘ Tithes, like molehills in an evening sun, cast
long shadows from little heights” (494); ‘‘O Father
of Lights . . . let our moment here be sincere love
to Thyself, perfect charity to Thy Church, and holy
humanity to all men” (141). These are some of
many sentences in Gauden which in tone and manner
are absolutely in unison with passages in the Ezkon.

Thus the literary case for Gauden is so strong
that it can only be met by an equally strong case on
behalf of Charles. But is this possible? Here and
there in the works of Charles one catches a phrase
or thought which recalls the Zzkon. The rather un-
common word “ Boutefeu” for an incendiary, which
occurs once in the £zox, occurs twice in his works
(Bas., ii, 178, and B20. Regia, ii., 64), but I have
failed to find it in Gauden, The recurring references
in the Zzkon to Honour and Conscience are in com-
plete accordance with similar references in the king’s
letters to the queen, to the Duke of Ormonde, and
in some of his public papers. His letter to the Prince
of Wales of 29th November, 1648, and his Declara-
tion of 18th January, 1647, and of 22nd November,
1648, are quite in the spirit of the Zz£on, but from
some of these, or similar sources, the composer of
the Zzkon might have drawn some of his inspira-
tion. There is, however, in the real or alleged
works of the king a marked absence of those many
curious words, metaphors and antitheses which form
124 LITERARY FORGERIES

so conspicuous a feature of Gauden’s style and of
the style of the author of the Zzzonx. However
much therefore one may admire Charles for his fine
spirit of placability and patience, however much one
may deplore his fate, the claims of truth compel one
irresistibly to the conclusion that the Zzonx has no
real right to the title of ‘the King’s Book,” but that
it must be assigned “wholly and only” to the in-
vention of Gauden.

Others of course must have been privy with
Gauden to the imposture, and kept the secret to
themselves. If Dugard’s affidavit, entered in the
Record Office under the date of October, 1661, may
be trusted, Dugard printed it as ‘‘the King’s Book,”
having received it from Symmons, the king’s chap-
lain; and at the same time he received to print
(though it was not printed till later) a work by
Gauden sent to him from the Hague by Sir E.
Nicholas (28th April, 1649). There was in all this
some plot or trickery which cannot now be explained ;
for, according to the Stationer’s Court Record, on
2nd April, 1649, Symmons came before the Court
with a request that the entrance to him of the King’s
Book might be “‘crossed out and made void, which
was granted, and he did it with his own hand and
subscribed his name thereto”. What can this mean
but that Symmons, having been made party to a
fraud, wished to clear himself of complicity in it, and
that he refused to have anything to do with its
appellation of “the King’s Book”?
POLITICAL FORGERY 125

But Gauden’s work cannot fairly be classed
amongst ordinary forgeries. In his endeavour to
write in the spirit of the king he so far surpassed
himself as to produce a masterpiece in its kind.
Allowance, too, must be made for the effect on a
strong and sincere loyalist of the dire extremity of
the king’s condition. If by such means a diversion
might be created in his favour, how can the idea and
the attempt be blamed? Gauden in a sense re-created
Charles I., and the Royalists of to-day, instead of
covering Gauden with abuse, should more rightfully
raise a statue to his memory.
CHAPTER VII.
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH.

Forcery, which has invaded every department of
literary activity, has made its most complete con-
quests and left its most indelible marks in the field of
ecclesiastical literature. The composition of works
in support of definite ends, though it long preceded
the Christian era, seems to have acquired increased
impetus after the introduction of the new religion
had supplied new motives for fictitious writing. The
contest from the first between different opinions and
doctrines led naturally to works composed in defence
of the writer’s views, and to their ascription to names
which might serve to claim attention and to clothe
them with credit.

The consequence has been the hopeless bewilder-
ment of critics of a later date who have vainly at-
tempted to separate the wheat from the chaff, and
to distinguish between the genuine and spurious
works of the early Christian Church.

A final judgment can never be hoped for regard-
ing such productions as the letters attributed to St.

Clement, St. Ignatius, or Polycarp, nor is the mystery
126
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 127

likely to be solved as to the authorship of the Szby/-
line Oracles, the Correspondence of St. Paul and
Seneca, or those books of the New Testament
which Eusebius placed in his category of Contested
Scriptures.

When forgery became ecclesiastical, it touched
the infinite. The greatness of the interests at stake,
the rivalries of doctrines and churches, produced for
an insatiable demand a boundless supply of false
documents. False epistles and false martyrdoms
entered so widely into the history of the Christian
Church as to have rendered that history mainly hypo-
thetical.

Even into the earliest and most honest attempt
at such a history, that of Eusebius in the fourth
century, much that is fabulous has found its way.
The correspondence between Christ and Agbar,
King of Edessa, has long been relegated to the
realm of fiction, though accepted as genuine by
Eusebius; and it. may be suspected that as little
credit is due to such an episode as that of the Martyrs
of Lyons which he relates in his fifth book as illus-
trative of a world-wide persecution under Marcus
Aurelius in the year 177. For no writer, pagan or
Christian, before him makes the least allusion to such
an event, and Eusebius lived about a century and
a half after its alleged occurrence. It is incredible
that contemporaries like Tertullian (about 150-240),
Clement of Alexandria (150-220), Athenagoras,
Origen (185-234), or other intermediate writers like
128 LITERARY FORGERIES

Cyprian or Lactantius, all six of whom wrote spe-
cifically on the subject of persecutions, should have
conspired to make not the smallest allusion to any
persecution of the sort, had such a persecution been
an historical reality.

Tradition has always connected the name of
Irenzus, Presbyter of Lyons at the time, with the
authorship of this narrative, and the tradition is amply
supported by the style of the composition. As he re-
presents the pagans as searching out even the most
obscure Christians, it is not evident how so prominent
a Christian as himself incurred no danger at all, but
remained an uninjured spectator of the persecution,
and was suffered to hold free intercourse with the
martyrs in prison. But this is only one of the many
difficulties. And a writer who could assert, as Ire-
nzus did, that he himself had often heard persons
“speak with tongues,” and that it was a common thing
in the church of his day to raise the dead to life again,
has no claim to the unlimited belief that has been
vouchsafed to him. He was probably one of the
earliest composers of those fictitious Martyria which
became so favourite a subject with imaginative
writers. And there is strong evidence that he also
wrote the story of the martyrdom of Polycarp and
others at Smyrna (for which an equivocal allusion by
himself is the only contemporary evidence with the
smallest claim to value). Irenzeus has no title to
implicit trust when he relates martyrdoms to which
no satisfactory date can be assigned, and which con-
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 129

flict at innumerable points with all that is otherwise
known of the history of the time.

No denial of the numerous and cruel persecutions
of the early Christians which have blackened the
pages of history is involved in the proposition that
in no other direction did exaggeration and invention
become more conspicuous. Such Martyria were the
form that pious fiction took. On the accepted
principle that that must be the truth for which men
had been willing to die, martyrdoms were regarded
as the best proof of soundness of doctrine. Origen’s
clear statement, that down to his time those who had
actually died for the faith were very few and easily
numerable (though attempts have been made to
reduce its significance), really governs all the cases of
martyrdom recorded of the first two centuries.

And as the centuries continued, these fictions in-
creased in volume, till at last we reach that Bollandist
collection in sixty-four colossal volumes which it took
many generations of Jesuit writers more than 150
years to complete, from the time when John Bol-
landus began the work: perhaps the most astonishing
literary enterprise that the world can show, though
certainly as historically worthless as it is wonderful
in execution.

In the gradual course of the contest between vary-
ing shades of Christian thought certain books came
to be distinguished as genuine or canonical as opposed
to others which were apocryphal. When the neces-

sity of a rule of faith became obvious, as it did
9
130 LITERARY FORGERIES

towards the end of the second century, about the time
of Irenaeus, certain books were accepted to supply
and constitute the Canon, and certain others were
excluded from it. The grounds for such exclusion
are no longer clear, and several works, now deemed
apocryphal, enjoyed for a time the sunshine of the
Church’s favour. Asa rule apocryphal works were
ascribed to heretics, but this only meant that they
were the work of an ecclesiastical minority. Some-
times even the writer belonged to the orthodox and
dominant party, as in the case of that unnamed Pres-
byter of the Church who, according to Irenzus, was
the author of the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

It is only rarely that a name emerges in those
early times, Pope Innocent I. (4.D. 402-417), in his
reference to uncanonical works, condemns those
circulated under the name of St. Andrew as the
works of two philosophers, called Nexocharides and
Leonidas; whilst others under the names of St.
Matthias or James the Less, of St. Peter and John
(exclusive of the canonical works), he assigns to a
certain Leutius. This Leutius is probably the same
person who is referred to again in Pope Galasius’
list of apocryphal books, where he alludes to “the
Gospels which Lucianus falsified” and to “all the
books made by Lucius, disciple of the devil”. Esitius
is also mentioned as another writer of these false
Gospels.

Galasius, quoting from memory, makes a goodly
list of works which had an heretical or a schismatic
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 131

origin. It is curious to find in a list containing such
works as “the Acts of St. Andrew; of St. Thomas;
of St. Philip,” or “the Gospels of St. Matthias ; of
St. Peter; of St. James ; of St. Barnabas; or St.
Bartholomew,” the works also of such pillars of the
Church as Tertullian, Lactantius and Arnobius.

The principle on which the Church rejected some
works and received others is lost to us, and it would
be an endless task to try to test the justice of the de-
cision. It is evident that an overwhelming mass of
fiction was produced which tried to win a footing in
the world under the cloak of certain distinguished
Christian names. The motives of the writers may
be fairly well divined, but their names are for the most
part as little known to us as they were probably to
their contemporaries,

But all other ecclesiastical forgeries pale before
that of the ‘‘ False Decretals,” compared with which
the worst frauds from other fields of literature seem
but paltry and almost venial. These others may
have served to enrich an impostor or to bewilder the
learned, but the “‘ False Decretals” affected and still
affect the history of the world and the destinies of
nations. They enjoyed an undisputed authority and
an unsuspected title from their first appearance about
the middle of the ninth century to the fifteenth, when
the suspicion of their fictitious character rapidly
passed into certainty.

The attempt to impose them on the world as

the work of Isidore, the learned Archbishop of
9 *
132 LITERARY FORGERIES

Seville who died in 636, was most deliberate ; for
the preface purports to be by Isidore, and is
continued as if by him in the first person singular.
And the ruse was perfectly successful, for who in
that age would venture to gainsay the authority of
Isidore?

The immense literature which has been built upon
the ‘‘ False Decretals” has failed to detect with cer-
tainty their real author. They have been assigned
by some with a fair show of reason to Ebo, who
preceded Hincmar as Archbishop of Rheims; by
some to Otgar, Archbishop of Mainz; by some to
Rothad, Bishop of Soissons, whom they helped Pope
Nicholas I. to defend against Hincmar; by some to
Benedictus Levita, Deacon of Mainz. Amid such di-
versity of opinion the only bond of agreement seems
to exist in their ascription to some ecclesiastic of pro-
minent position in the Church. It was achurchman’s,
not a layman’s production.

The unknown writer of the “ Decretals” did not
rely entirely on his own powers of invention, but made
extensive use of genuine earlier documents. Thus
the second part of his work, consisting of the Canons
of the Greek, African, Gallic and Spanish Councils
to the year 683, was incorporated from the “ Hispana
Collectio” of Councils, collected about the end of the
seventh century, and also ascribed erroneously to Isi-
dore, Archbishop of Seville. And this in its turn was
based on an earlier collection made in the sixth cen-
tury by Dionysius Exiguus, who is famous as having
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 133

been the first to introduce the Christian era into
chronology.

But the mass of spurious work is nevertheless
amazing. The sixty Decretals or Rescripts of the
first part, extending from Pope Clement in the first
century to Melchiades in the fourth, and distributed
among twenty-nine different Popes, constitute a re-
markable literary performance. And yet of these
letters Dionysius Exiguus, who lived at Rome, strange
to say, knew nothing.

But this is not all. For the third part, which in-
cludes many genuine letters taken from the “‘ Hispana
Collectio,” and covers the period from Pope Sylvester
in the fourth century to Gregory II. in the eighth, con-
tains as many as thirty-five forged letters, including
all to the time of Pope Damasus, namely, those of
Sylvester, Marcus, Julius, Liberius and Felix. And
even the genuine letters suffer from interpolations.

The whole thing was contrived and composed
with the greatest ability. The writer covers the
whole field of Christian doctrine, morals and discip-
line, and an irreproachable Papal style and elevated
moral tone never deserts him. Excellent sermons
might to this day be culled from the “ False Decre-
tals,” dealing as they often do with the commonest
stumbling-blocks of daily life. As where, for ex-
ample, Pope Fabian (4.p. 242) says: ‘‘ Many have
perished by the sword, but more there are who have
perished through their own tongue”.

And the same words are put into the mouth of
134 LITERARY FORGERIES

Pope Pontianus (a.p. 230); in fact, a whole page of
Pope Pontianus is almost verbally identical with a
passage in Pope Fabian, as if the writer thought that
a passage to his liking could not appear too often ; or
as if he forgot, in composing a letter for Pope Fabian,
that he had already used the same passage in com-
posing,one for Pope Pontianus. Such repetitions are
not infrequent in his work, and, supplementing long
quotations from the Bible, must have much facilitated
the task of composition.

The “ False Decretals” constituted as it were an
_ additional storey in an edifice of falsehood. Itis diffi-
cult to say at how early a date the wilful falsification
of history for ecclesiastical purposes began; but a
vigorous attempt in this direction had already been
made in the sixth century when the catalogue of the
Roman bishops, the Lzber Pontzficats, appeared in its
first edition of 530. The fictions in this work about
the Popes, whom it represented as always legislating
for the Church as a whole, were incorporated in the
‘False Decretals,’ and in those uncritical times
helped to give support to the later fabrication.

It has been contended that the ‘‘ False Decretals”
rather expressed the Christianity of the ninth century
than added anything material to Christian tradition.
In any case the work was not produced without a
very definite object, and the object that clearly inter-
ested its composer more than any other was the ad-
vancement of the episcopate, and of the interests of
the Church as against those of the lay world. The
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 135

aggrandisement of the Papacy was also an object with
him, and, although it can no longer be contended that
this was his primary or sole object, it tended to be
one of the effects, nor was Nicholas I. slow to avail
himself of the power it supplied. To make the epis-
copate a caste apart from the laity, safe from lay
accusations or lay tribunals, was an obvious desire of
the writer ; and thus Pope Eusebius is made to say :
“Tt has hitherto been observed and ruled that the
laity should not accuse the bishops, because they are
not of the same mode of life”; the carnal and the
spiritual having nothing in common. And so Pope °
Felix is made to write: “It has been decreed by
the rules of the synods that no one should accuse a
bishop before secular judges”. Another solicitude of
the writer on behalf of the bishops was to protect
them from the tyranny of their metropolitans and to
confirm their right of appeal to Rome.

In the chaotic state of the world in the ninth cen-
tury after the death of Charlemagne there was much
excuse for a writer’s identifying the cause of the
Church with the maintenance of order ; and in trying
to strengthen his case by inventing for Popes letters
which they never wrote, he did not always exceed
the claims of previous centuries on behalf of the
Church. A claim for the actual divinity of bishops
went back at least to the time of Constantine, for
Rufinus in his history (1-2) thus tells the story of the
emperor's address to the bishops he had collected for
the Nicene Council: “God hath made you priests
136 LITERARY FORGERIES

and given you the power of sitting in judgment even
over us. And therefore we are rightly judged by
you, but you cannot be judged by men. Wherefore
as between one another look for judgment from God
alone, that whatever disputes you may have may be
reserved for that Divine trial; for you have been given
to us as gods by God (xodzs a Deo datz estis dit). It
is not fitting that a man should judge gods, save Him
alone of whom it is written ‘God standeth in the con-
gregation of the gods: He judgeth among the gods’
(Deus stetit in synagoga deorum, in medio autem deos
discernit)” (Ps. 1xxxii. 1).

The claim for episcopacy could hardly go beyond
this, from which of course flowed as a corollary that
right of the Church to absolute independence of the
State on which the writer of the “ False Decretals”
was so insistent. Church and State were related as
Spiritual and Carnal, between which it was held
there could be no communion.

These exalted claims for the Church and the
Papacy were not so much invented by the writer as
stereotyped by him and successfully imposed by him
on the world for many centuries. This is specially
true of the ‘“ Donation of Constantine,” which was
incorporated in his second part by the writer, but
which had been composed in the preceding century
by some unknown Roman ecclesiastic. It was first
mentioned in 777 by Pope Hadrian I., and Dollinger’s
theory seems a plausible one, that its inventor’s aim
was to bring the whole of Italy into one kingdom
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 137

ruled by the Pope, and so to free it from the divided
control of the Lombards and Greeks.

In the history of the Church there were many
other forged ‘‘ Donations” besides that of Constan-
tine ; there was, for instance, King Pepin’s Donation
of nearly the whole of Italy to the Pope; but all such
attempts sink into insignificance by the side of the
“Donation of Constantine,” which, consisting as it
does of only a few pages, has probably had more in-
fluence on the course of human history than anything
else of human invention.

It purports to be addressed by the emperor, with
all his titles, to Pope Sylvester and all his successors
who shall sit in the seat of the Blessed Peter to the
end of time. Constantine begins with a full profes-
sion of the Christian faith as he had been taught it
by Sylvester, who had turned him from idols and
all the pomps of Satan to the true faith. And then
follows the interesting story of this conversion: how,
when his whole flesh was a mass of leprosy, and
many physicians proved unavailing, the priests of the
Capitol bade the emperor wash in water filled with
the blood of little children; but how Constantine,
pitying the weeping mothers, ordered their children to
be restored to them, and would have no resort to so
cruel a remedy. That same night St. Peter and St.
Paul stood before him, and bade him send for Syl-
vester, then a fugitive with his clergy in the caves
of Mount Soracte; he would baptise him three times,
and all his leprosy would be healed. In return Con-
138 LITERARY FORGERIES

stantine was to order the restoration of all churches
throughout the world, and himself to forsake idols,
and worship the true God. Next day Constantine
sent for Sylvester, and, having asked to see pictures
of St. Peter and St. Paul, confessed with a great
shout before all his courtiers that these were identical
with the figures he had seen in his sleep. Then
Sylvester prescribed a course of penance in the
Lateran Palace; the emperor confessed his belief
in Christianity before all the people, and the cere-
mony of baptism washed away his leprosy.

Such an incident could not but make the emperor
both grateful and generous, and Constantine’s gener-
osity knew no bounds. The Imperial power and
dignity of Rome he transferred forthwith to the
Roman Church, which was henceforth to be supreme
not only over the churches of Alexandria, Antioch,
Jerusalem, Constantinople, but over all other churches
in the world. And the Pope was to be supreme over
all other priests in the world, and to be the disposer of
all things that touched worship or faith. And the
church which Constantine had built on the Lateran
was to be called and reverenced as the head of all
the churches of the world; whilst on the Blessed
Saints Peter and Paul and on the Pope and his suc-
cessors for ever was conferred the Lateran Palace it-
self, finer than all others on earth, together with the
Imperial diadem (‘the crown of our head”) and in
general all the robes, sceptres and ornaments of the
Imperial dignity.
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 139

As the Pope was to take the place of the emperor,
so were the priests of the Church to take the place of
the ancient civil power; the powers and privileges
of the senate and consuls of Rome were to pass to
them ; the Roman clergy were to wear the senatorial
white sandals, and to ride on horses with white cover-
ings.

But even this surrender was not complete nor
abject enough. With his own hands the emperor
placed on Sylvester’s head that mitre or white Phry-
gian cap that symbolised the Resurrection, and held
the bridle of his horse. Moreover, he gave up to
him the Lateran Palace, and all the provinces, places
and cities of Rome and Italy, or the western regions
(‘‘ Romane et omnes Italize seu occidentalium region-
um provincias, loca, et civitates . . . nostro Silvestro
universali pape concedimus atque relinquimus ”).

And, since it was not fitting that where the head
of the Christian religion reigned an earthly emperor
should hold dominion, to the city called after him in
the East would Constantine transfer his rule. And
his successors for all time he bound by the most
solemn vows never to infringe on these concessions.

It is difficult to conceive a bolder or more glorious
fiction, or one more successful. It held the credulity
of the world throughout the middle ages, and to this
day influences the mode of thought of many millions.
No one seems to have inquired whether as a fact
the emperors after Constantine had given up the rule
of the West, or to have remembered that Constantine
140 LITERARY FORGERIES

was really baptised by the Arian Bishop Eusebius at
Nicomedia shortly before his death, not at his con-
version, nor in Rome at all.

Both the “ Donation” and the ‘ Decretals” had an
incalculable effect upon history, and in some directions
a good effect. Nicholas I., one of the greatest of the
Popes (858-867), made use of the ‘‘ Decretals” in his
successful interposition for the protection of Rothad,
Bishop of Soissons, against the arbitrary oppression
of Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims. Hincmar had
deposed and imprisoned Rothad with the aid of
Charles the Bald (862). Nicholas demanded his
restoration from Charles, and, having summoned
Rothad to Rome, reinstated him and sent him back
to his see in France, Hincmar pleading in vain the
inapplicability of the “‘ Decretals” to France. There
can be little doubt but that in this direction of pro-
tecting the bishops and clergy against the tyranny of
metropolitans and the secular powers the “ Decretals”
had a beneficial effect by strengthening the hands of
the Popes,

But the greatest effect flowed from the territorial
concession to the Papacy. The writer's words only
applied to Rome and Italy ov the western regions.
The word “seu” for “or” was intended as explana-
tory: ‘Italy, that is the western regions,” meaning
Istria, Corsica and Sardinia, not such countries as
France, Spain, Britain, which in Constantine’s time
belonged to the Roman dominion. So it was long
understood, but in course of time the more extensive
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 141

claim was made, and Anselm of Lucca, in referring
to the ‘‘ Donation,” substituted the word ‘‘and” for the
more ambiguous “or”. Constantine, according to
him, conceded the Imperial power in Rome and Italy
‘and in the western parts”. This would have made
most kingdoms of Europe mere fiefs of the Papacy.

A notion arose that Constantine had specially
conferred all islands on the Papacy, albeit there is no
reference to islands in the document. It was thus in
virtue of the ‘“ Donation” that the English Pope,
Hadrian IV., claimed the possession of Ireland, and
then conferred it on Henry II. (1155) as, like all
Christian islands, belonging of right to St. Peter
and the Roman Church. Hadrian’s friend, John of
Salisbury, who persuaded him to this step, refers to
the ‘‘ Donation” as the ground of this grant ; and thus
began that long struggle between England and
Ireland which has proved so disastrous for both
countries. In all other gifts of newly discovered
islands or continents the Papacy was but disposing of
territories which Constantine had implicitly bestowed
upon itself.

Pope Nicholas I., during whose Pontificate the
“False Decretals” appeared, undoubtedly made use
of them for the extension of the papal power; but
it was not till about two centuries later that they
became effective for that establishment of a pure
theocracy over the world at which the papal party
then definitely aimed. With the Pontificate of
Gregory VII., in the eleventh century, a new storey
142 LITERARY FORGERIES

of the ecclesiastical edifice was raised, and the forgery
of Isidore was utilised and improved upon by Anselm
of Lucca, who composed about 1083 a new collection
of Church law. The names of Cardinal Deusdedit,
Cardinal Gregory of Pavia, and Bonizo, are those of
other diligent and successful workers in the same
school. The power to dethrone kings and emperors
was now boldly formulated, and the supremacy of the
Canon law over all civil laws or institutions. If in
an earlier age the bishops had claimed to be gods, a
slight alteration in the story of Constantine and the
bishops at Nicea enabled the Pope to claim divinity :—

“Tt is clearly enough shown that the Pope cannot
be bound or loosed by the secular power, seeing that
it\is agreed that he was by the pious Prince Constan-
tine called a God, and it is manifest that a God cannot
be judged by men” (Gratian’s Dzst., 96, 7).

After this it is not surprising to find the Canonists
claiming for all decretals of the Popes (including Isi-
dore’s) a place among the Canonical Scriptures.
‘‘ Among the Canonical Scriptures the decretal epistles
are counted,” said Gratian, who but borrowed from
Anselm and Cardinal Gregory a wilful falsification of
a,passage in St. Augustine. Gratian’s famous “ De-
cretum,” appearing at Bologna about the year 1150,
and displacing all the older collections of the Canon
law, added fresh fabrications to those it incorporated
from Isidore, Anselm, and the others. The right or
duty of the Church to constrain men to faith by tor-
ture, and to execute and confiscate the property of
FORGERY IN THE CHURCH 143

heretics was elaborated by Gratian in a number of
canons. No book had an influence equal to Gratian’s
on the history of the Church, and therefore of the
world. Now was firmly established the right of the
Pope to dispense as he pleased even with all laws
of the Church, thus rendering him an absolutely ar-
bitrary autocrat. And on Gratian was built all the
ecclesiastical jurisprudence of the middle ages.

But ecclesiastical forgery never ceased, Domini-
can writers themselves confess that St. Thomas of
Aquinas had been deceived by a forgery when he
relied on certain passages of the Greek fathers, more
especially of Cyril of Alexandria, to introduce into
dogmatic theology the doctrine of the infallibility and
absolute power of the Pope; and that St. Thomas,
himself deceived, deceived a long succession of sub-
sequent theologians and canonists. And to the same
end served many a history of the Church, deliberately
falsified. When one considers all that flowed from
this systematic fraud, all the struggles between Popes
and secular rulers, the depositions of kings and em-
perors, the excommunications, the inquisitions, indul-
gences, absolutions, persecutions and burnings, and
reflects that all this miserable history was the direct
product of a series of forgeries of which the ‘‘ Dona-
tion of Constantine” and the “ False Decretals” were
not indeed the earliest, but the most important, one
is disposed to wonder whether falsehood rather than
truth has not had the more permanent effect on the
destinies of mankind.
144 LITERARY FORGERIES

But the light of truth penetrated at last even this
egregious édifice of fiction. In the fifteenth century
criticism effectually pierced the thick mass of deceit,
and exposed the spuriousness of the “ Decretals,” the
“Donation,” and of much besides. To Cardinal
Nicholas de Cusa and Laurentius Valla belongs the
honour of first establishing the truth ; and remarkable
it is that, despite the damaging blows dealt by Valla’s
treatise at the papal system, he was taken into the
service of Nicholas V. after its appearance, and re-
ceived both from him and his successor, Calixtus III.,
signal marks of their favour.

Nor in this honourable rivalry must Reginald
Pococke, for a brief spell Bishop of Chichester, be for-
gotten, who about 1449 published that enlightened
work against the Lollards, called the Repression of
Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, which with other
books of his he was not only compelled to recant but to
burn with his own hands at St. Paul’s Cross a few years
later. The attempt to vindicate the genuineness of
the ‘‘Decretals” by the Jesuit Torres in 1572 led to its
more total discomfiture at the hands of the Calvinist
divine David Blondel in 1628. And now it only re-
mains as the greatest monument of successful impos-
ture that the world can show or that the genius of
man has ever produced ; the strongest chain for the
enslavement of the human spirit that the Catholic
priestcraft ever succeeded in forging.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON.

Tue name of Chatterton has supplied the English
language with a synonym for a literary forger, and
the controversy is long since dead which raged so
fiercely round the authenticity of the poems which
Chatterton at the age of sixteen copied, as he alleged,
from the poems of Thomas Rowley, the monk of the
fifteenth century, taken by Chatterton’s father from the
old chest at St. Mary Redcliffe’s Church at Bristol.
It was finally laid to rest by Professor Skeat’s Essay
on the Rowley poems prefixed to the second volume
of his edition of Chatterton’s Poetzcal Works (1871).
The youthful poet himself supplied the verses, and
then proceeded by the help of Kersey’s or Bailey’s
Dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon to give them an air of
antiquity. But this plan involved the poet in the
mistakes of his authorities, as where we find him using
the word ‘“cherisaunei,” not ‘“‘cherisaunce,” for com-
fort, owing to Kersey having preceded him in that
identical error.

But when stripped of their garb of pseudo-anti-
quity and transposed into modern and legible English,

as they are in Professor Skeat’s edition, the Rowley
145 Io
146 LITERARY FORGERIES

poems are remarkable works, whose production
should have entitled Chatterton’s memory to more
lenient treatment than it ever received. Here was a
poor youth, after such education as he might have re-
ceived as a Blue-coat schoolboy, immured at the age
of fourteen in a lawyer’s office for twelve hours a day,
living with a widowed mother and sister in indigent
circumstances; yet at the age of sixteen and seven-
teen he is capable of writing poems from which even
those of his contemporaries who were most condem-
natory of the deception could not withhold their ad-
miration. Malone, whose Cursory Observations on
the Rowley poems (1782) contributed so much to dis-
credit them, pronounced Chatterton to be, in his
opinion, the greatest genius that England had pro-
duced since the days of Shakespeare, whilst Walpole
expressed the opinion, which occurs to all who come
fresh to the study of the poems, that almost more of
a miracle was involved in their being written by a
youth of Chatterton’s age than in all the difficulties
of metre and diction involved in their ascription to
Rowley. The choice of subjects, the felicity of phrase
and metaphors, the harmony of rhythm, displayed in
such poems as the “ Bristowe Tragedie,” ‘‘ AZlla,” or
the “ Battle of Hastings,” would have conferred credit
on any poet, whilst they are entirely free from any of
those marks of immaturity which alone might have
been expected to betray the boyhood of their real
composer.

It was this consideration which convinced Chatter-
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 147

ton’s friend Thistlethwaite of the reality of Rowley
and his poems. Chatterton, he argued, would
never, with his thirst for praise, have ascribed to
another what was calculated to confer so much
honour on himself. Nor has this point been ever
cleared up by the vast army of Chatterton’s bio-
graphers. What set him to write verse in the name
of Rowley and other imaginary medizval poets, if
he were himself capable of writing verse worthy of
receiving recognition? There must have been more
design in it than the mere dreamy pleasure of living
poetically in a bygone age.

That design was probably nothing more than to
use the acquired reputation of Rowley as a stepping-
stone to his own personal recognition as an aspirant
to poetical rank. Had his design not miscarried,
Rowley, having served his purpose, would probably
have been disavowed, and the truth acknowledged.
In such a course he would have perhaps appealed to
the case of the precedent set him by Horace Walpole
in his Castle of Otranto. The first edition of this
appeared in 1764, when Chatterton was twelve, and
was ushered into the world by Walpole under the
following preface, which, if not intended, was at least
calculated to deceive many :—

“The following work was found in the library of
an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.
It was printed at Naples, in the black-letter, in the
year 1529. How much sooner it was written does

not appear.... The style is the purest Italian.
10 *
148 LITERARY FORGERIES

If the story was written near the time when it is
supposed to have happened, it must have been
between 1095, the era of the first crusade, and 1243,
the date of the last or not long afterwards. .. . It
is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour
of his adopted work. . . . Should it meet with the
success I hope for, I may be encouraged to reprint
the original Italian, though it will tend to depreciate
my own labour,” etc.

Every word of this of course was false, but the
falsehood proved a successful advertisement, and in
his preface to the second edition in 1766 the author
offered the following cavalier apology to the public
he had trifled with :—

“Tt is fit that he should ask pardon of his readers
for having offered his work to them under the bor-
rowed personage of a translator, As diffidence of
his own abilities, and the novelty of the attempt, were
the sole inducements to assume that disguise, he
flatters himself he shall appear excusable.”

Had Chatterton once succeeded in getting his
antique poems published, might he not as reason-
ably as Walpole have asked pardon of his readers for
having offered his work to them under the borrowed
personage of a transcriber? That fatal dose of
arsenic or opium before he was quite eighteen leaves
us to pure surmise about Chatterton’s real design.
But had the poems been once published as antiques,
would their publication under such false. colours have
been divided by any impassable moral gulf from the
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 149

publication of the Castle of Otranto under the fictions
prefixed to it by Horace Walpole?

With this theory of Chatterton’s probable design,
to which Walpole’s successful example possibly con-
tributed, the facts of his story completely coincide.
The first step being to get his compositions published,
he must perforce seek for a publisher for “ A‘Ila”
and some others of his poems, Therefore the first
attempt was on Dodsley, the publisher, whose curi-
osity he tried to arouse by an offer to send him copies
of ‘‘several ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps
the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley,
a priest of Bristol, who lived in the reigns of Henry
VI. and Edward IV.” (21st December, 1768). Then
two months later (15th February, 1769) came another
attempt ; the possessor of the tragedy of “ A¢lla,” of
which he had obtained a sight after a long search,
would not part with it for less than a guinea. The
publisher should have a copy for that sum, though
the writer had no mercenary views, and, were he
able, would print it at his own risk. If the publisher
would give him an estimate of the expense of such
printing, he would try to publish it by subscription
on his own account.

When the publisher proved as deaf as is the
wont of his kind to these siren suggestions, Chatter-
ton must turn elsewhere ; and to whom could he
better turn for help and patronage than to that very
Horace Walpole whose publication of the Castle of
Otranto seemed to hold out, in case of need, some
150 LITERARY FORGERIES

promise of sympathy and assistance? So with him
he began a correspondence (25th March, 1769) with
deliberate attempt to deceive. It was this attempt
that widely differentiated the Rowley poems morally
from the more conventional deception of the Castle
of Otranto. Walpole replied on the 28th in a letter
of almost fulsome politeness, declaring that the verses
sent him as a specimen of the Abbot John’s of the

“

twelfth century were ‘wonderful for their harmony
and spirit”; accepting Chatterton’s assertion that
the said Abbot had invented oil-painting in England
at a date anterior to its discovery by John Ab Eyck ;
asking where Rowley’s poems were to be found, and
adding the welcome intelligence that he should “ not
be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of
them,” if they had never been printed. 3
Chatterton must have felt that he had indeed
“struck oil,” and at the very first attempt. Forth-
with more specimens of antiquity were posted to
Walpole with some account of the writer’s circum-
stances. But this time the specimens were suspected,
Walpole’s own scepticism being confirmed by that of
the poets Mason and Gray, who.at once pronounced
them forgeries. Walpole intimated as. much to
Chatterton, and added the sensible advice that the
poet should stick to his profession as a lawyer till the
attainment of a sufficient fortune justified his indulgence
in literary studies. Chatterton’s reply (8th April)
proves that the kindness of Walpole’s advice nearly
prevailed: he could not dispute with Walpole; he
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 151

had copied Rowley’s poems from a copy in the
possession of a gentleman who was assured of their
authenticity and had long possessed them. Though
only sixteen, he could see that poverty was the lot of
literature. He was obliged for Walpole’s advice, and
would go a little beyond it, by destroying all his
“useless lumber of literature” and never using his
pen in future but in the law.

There seems no reason to doubt Chatterton’s
sincerity in this letter. Well for him had it been,
had he kept to his first impulse, and accepted the
older man’s advice. In the letter of self-vindication
written by Walpole in 1778, he was justified in saying
that his letter to Chatterton had been written ‘“ with
as much kindness and tenderness as if he had been
his guardian”. Considering that Walpole was then
aware that his unknown and youthful correspondent
had tried to make him his dupe, the letter of paternal
advice might well have been one of indignant remon-
strance. And if Chatterton had calculated that
Walpole would have a fellow-feeling for him, even if
he detected the fraud, his calculation was not erro-
neous, for Walpole expressly says that he deemed it
‘no grave crime in a young bard to have forged false
notes of hand that were to pass current only in the
parish of Parnassus”. It was only what he had him-
self done in the matter of his Castle of Otranto.

So far all was well. Walpole’s moral sense had
taken no offence at the attempted imposition, though
abundance of that came later, when Walpole’s own
152 LITERARY FORGERIES

conduct in connection with Chatterton had come to
be impugned. But then came the breach. Within
a week Chatterton wrote again to Walpole, asking
politely for the return of the Rowley papers, of whose
genuineness he was “fully convinced,” and adding in
a postscript: “If you will publish them yourself,
they are at your service” (14th April). This extra-
ordinary suggestion, and evident hope, that Walpole
would himself publish poems of whose spuriousness
he had already expressed no uncertain opinion, seems
to prove that in addressing himself to Walpole rather
than to any other literary man of the time, Chatter-
ton felt that the merit of the works submitted to
Walpole’s judgment would override considerations of
the truth about their authorship. It might have
been so, had not Walpole, then just departing for
Paris, forgotten to return the copies; thereby expos-
ing himself to an angry letter from Chatterton on
his return (dated 24th July), complaining of his
inattention to a repeated request for the return of
the papers. These were returned on the 4th of
August; but there was an end to all hope of publica-
tion through Walpole. The irritation of the boy was
only too natural, nothing being more maddening to
the “irritable race” than the retention of their MSS.,
but it was playing a fatally false card to display it.
Walpole, more judiciously treated, might still have
assisted.

In later years Walpole attributed to the success
of the Ossian poems, of which he himself had been
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 153

at first a dupe, Chatterton’s idea of the Rowley
poems; but such success had not been achieved by
Macpherson when Chatterton in his early boyhood
composed his ballad of “ Elinoure and Juga”. This
cannot have been the specimen of Rowley which he
sent to Walpole, for he published it in the Zowx and
Country Magazine for May, 1769, during the very
time when Walpole was in possession of the unre-
turned MSS. After that Chatterton seems to have
desisted from his idea of winning fame by poems in
the antique style, and to have turned his attention to
ordinary composition. Between the August of 1769,
when Walpole returned his MSS., and the August
of the next year, when he committed suicide, there is
not only no more production of ancient poems but
little discernible attempt to turn previous productions
of that sort to profitable use. This alone would
seem to indicate that Walpole, as the author of the
Castle of Otranto, was approached by Chatterton as
alone likely to assist his rise under the personation of
Rowley ; for otherwise there were numberless other
men of letters to whom he might have applied when
Walpole failed. Hence the bitterness which ex-
pressed itself against Walpole in the following verses
written about this time :—

Walpole, I thought not I should ever see

So mean a heart as thine has proved to be.

Thou who, in luxury nurst, behold’st with scorn

The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn,

Asks thy high favour—thou mayst call me cheat—
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?
154 LITERARY FORGERIES

Who wrote Ofranto, but I will not chide;
Scorn I'll repay with scorn, and pride with pride.

Had I the gifts of wealth and luxury shared,

Not poor and mean, Walpole, thou hadst not dared
Thus to insult. But I shall live and stand

By Rowley’s side, when thou art dead and damned.

These lines lend strong support to the theory of
the close dependence of the Rowley poems on the
Castle of Otranto. Walpole had won notice for his
work by a false account of its origin; why should
not he, Chatterton, do the same? And perhaps,
having thus achieved a literary success, proclaim the
truth? If it were deceit, it was at least deceit
sanctioned by the authority of one of the most
fashionable writers of the day; a legitimate literary
expedient consonant with the highest precedents.
The gentleman therefore who had set the precedent
was naturally the patron to whom to turn.

It was perhaps some consciousness that this was
Chatterton’s line of reasoning which led to Walpole’s
extreme bitterness against his memory in later years.
For was there not a literary affinity between himself
and the dead poet ; and were not the Rowley poems
the direct offspring of the Castle of Otranto? The
appeal to himself to publish poems whose spurious-
ness he had detected was a clear, though tacit, in-
vitation to repeat on the public the experiment of his
own romance; and the resentment felt at such an
invitation, with all that it implied, was calculated to
increase rather than to diminish with time. The
‘

THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 155

obvious way to dissociate his own character from
that of his imitator, and to disavow the discreditable
connexion, was to throw scorn on Chatterton’s
memory, and to speak and write of him as a dis-
reputable impostor. This was the course that Wal-
pole took, and in this he has had many followers.
But posterity can afford to judge of Chatterton more
charitably, and to doubt if he intended a permanent
deception.

Few curiosities in the British Museum are of
more interest than the two thin volumes which con-
tain Chatterton’s manuscripts (Add. MSS., 5766, A-
B), and reveal the extreme beauty of his natural
handwriting.

This collection, revealing as it does the fabrica-
tion of many of those antique originals of which
Chatterton seldom suffered his contemporaries to
obtain a glimpse, has long since terminated a contro-
versy which was once acute. But how much of that
controversy was unnecessary! Take, for instance,
the first part of the “ Battle of Hastings”. Itis said
that Chatterton under pressure of his patron Barrett,
the surgeon and the historian of Bristol, confessed
himself the author of this part, but that Barrett re-
fused to believe him. It is difficult to see why
Barrett should wish to extort a confession he was
predetermined not to believe ; but it is more surpris-
ing that he should have wanted a confession at all.
For the copy brought to him by Chatterton bore the
following title: ‘“ Battle of Hastings, wrote by
156 LITERARY FORGERIES

Turgot the Monk, a Saxon, in the tenth century, and
translated by Thomas Rowlie, parish preeste of St.
Johns in the city of Bristol in the year 1465. The
remainder of the poem I have not been happy
enough to meet with.” But how could Turgot the
monk have written a poem in the ¢enwth century
about a battle which took place in the eleventh ?
How did this common mistake in naming the cen-
tury come to escape the notice of Barrett and of
the many subsequent critics of Chatterton ?

There is one point, unnoticed hitherto, which seems
clearly to reveal the hand of Chatterton in the longer
poems of Rowley. It is undisputed that the so-called
translations from the Saxon which Chatterton contri-
buted to the Zownz and Country Magazine, in imita-
tion or ridicule of the Ossianic poems, were his own
original compositions: ‘‘ Whenever asked for the ori-
ginal of these pieces,” said his friend Thistlethwaite,
‘he hesitated not to confess that they existed only in
his own imagination, and were merely the offspring and
invention of fancy”. One of the main characteristics
of these pieces, such as Ethelgar, Kenrick, Cerdick,
and others, is the constant reference to wolves, or
metaphors drawn from wolves; the wolf in these
imaginary translations appears at least twenty-five
times, and gives a distinct colouring to all the composi-
tions. But precisely the same characteristic appears
both in “ Alla” and in the ‘Battle of Hastings” ; the
wolf figuring seven times in “ A¢]la” and nine times
in the “ Battle of Hastings” ; once in the “ Unknown
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 157

Knight”: “bold asa mountain wolf he stood”. It is
as if Chatterton could not get the wolf off his mind,
or used it purposely to cover his work with the atmo-
sphere of a distant antiquity.

In fairness to Chatterton it should be borne in
mind that he never published the Rowley poems as a
whole. They were not so published till seven years
after his death from such papers as he had given or
sold to George Catcott, the pewterer, and Barrett, the
surgeon, supplemented by what Catcott bought of
Chatterton’s mother after her son’s death for a paltry
five guineas. Nor was it till after Dean Milles’ edi-
tion of them in 1782 that the controversy burst into
blaze. It is indeed remarkable that, whilst in 1769
Chatterton published his six Saxon works in the Zownz
and Country Magazine, the ‘ Elinoure and Juga” is
the only Rowley poem which he published in it.
The “ Balade of Charitie” was offered to the editor
of that magazine shortly before Chatterton’s death,
but it was rejected, and during the last four months
of his life spent in London, whither he had started
from Bristol with so much hope, and where he was
destined to die in such unaccountable and unexplained
despair, there was little serious attempt, and no suc-
cessful attempt, to turn the Rowley poems into money.
Poems and political writings of his own amply occu-
pied his time, nor is it possible to judge to what
extent, in a future that never came, he might have
tried to deceive the public with the Rowley poems.
That he deceived Catcott, and Barrett at Bristol,
158 LITERARY FORGERIES

and was wishful to deceive Dodsley and Walpole in
London cannot be gainsaid; but whether he in-
tended to carry such deception farther than its use
as a means of introduction to a powerful and literary
patron cannot now be determined.

It is difficult to conceive of any other motive ; for
there was no reward to be expected from such patrons
as Catcott and Barrett that could have at all compen-
sated for the labour involved in his compositions.
And when all is said that can be said about their
faults, their anachronisms, or their plagiarisms, they
must ever remain among the marvels as well as the
puzzles of literature. Dean Milles, Mr. Bryant, and
other believers in their authenticity, had considerable
material as well as moral basis for their belief. For it
was beyond doubt that the chest at St. Mary Red-
cliffe’s had been forced open in the time of Chatter-
ton’s father; that the father had been one of the main
spoilers of its documentary contents; that he had
used some of these for covering children’s copy-books,
and kept many others stored in a box; that the son
carried these parchments with him to Mr. Lambert’s
office, where out of twelve nominal hours of work he
often had ten at his own disposal. It rested on the fair
contemporary evidence of eye-witnesses that he was
often found at the office copying some ancient docu-
ments: Thistlethwaite in 1768 “at divers visits” found
him ‘employed in copying Rowley” from what he
always considered “authentic and undoubted origi-
nals” ; whilst Smith vouched for Chatterton’s hav-
THE TRAGEDY OF CHATTERTON 159

ing often read to him whole treatises or parts of poems
from ancient MSS., of which he had seen a dozen
and which he had often seen Chatterton transcribe at
the office. This office was described as strewn with
piles of such documents. No one will ever know
now what these documents were, or whether those
which Chatterton copied corresponded with the works
which he produced as ancient writings. But it is
impossible to get over the evidence that there was
this solid basis of fact both for Chatterton’s story and
for the belief of those who accepted it. It may be
that Chatterton’s idea was to utilise these old docu-
ments as materials for the acquisition of the old style
and phraseology, and that he furthered his plan by
pretending to his friends that they were the originals
of his fabrications. In that case his stratagem was
singularly successful.

Chatterton’s fabrications in prose are even more
marvellous than those he produced in verse. It is
difficult to conceive of any imagination elaborating
the details about the antiquities of churches with
which he provided Barrett for his history of Bristol.
And the same must be said of his Inscriptions, Pro-
clamations and Deeds. Whether or not the Thomas
Rowle, whom the registers of Wells prove to have
been made an acolyte in 1439 (Bryant’s Odservatzons,
536, 544), was the individual of Chatterton’s Rowley,
the youthful poet has endowed his fifteenth-century
monk with a semblance of life which can never cease
to astonish the readers of his works, and which has
160 LITERARY FORGERIES

given to him a more real existence than many past
actual lives now enjoy.

There is no evidence to justify the black colours
in which Chatterton’s general character has by some
writers been painted. And there is abundant evi-
dence to prove a character possessed of many laud-
able virtues. Against his vanity and resort to deceit
must be set his indefatigable industry, so that after
twelve hours’ confinement in Mr. Lambert’s office
he would often, says his sister, “sit up all night and
write by moonlight”. The affection and generosity
he always showed to his mother and sister are also
among the more pleasing aspects of his character.
In which connexion a singular pathos attaches to
the last, though far from the best, verses he ever
wrote, which bear the date of 24th August, 1770,
the day of his death :—

Farewell, Bristolia’s dingy piles of brick,

Lovers of Mammon, worshippers of Trick!

Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,

By nature fitted for Corruption’s tools!

I go to where celestial anthems swell ;

But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.
Farewell, my mother! cease, my anguished soul,
Nor let Distraction’s billows o’er me roll!

Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SHAME OF LAUDER.

Or all the stories of literary forgery none is more
remarkable than that connected with the name of
William Lauder, one of the foremost scholars of the
eighteenth century. Few men of his time could
write better Latin than this Scotch schoolmaster,
a graduate of Edinburgh University, or were more
widely versed in ancient and modern literature. Yet
he succumbed to a miserable temptation in_ his
passion to prove that Milton in writing Paradise
Lost was merely a plagiarist from previous authors.

Lauder, in his zeal to prove his point, could not
content himself with adducing passages from Grotius,
Massenius, and others, which it would have been
fair to contend that Milton might, or must, have
seen, or even copied; to make the resemblances
more striking he imported into the quoted passages
either lines of his own composition or even lines from
the Latin translation by Hog of Milton himself. As
a sample of this latter method let one glaring instance
suffice. Milton thus describes one of the conse-

quences of Adam’s fall :—
161 II
162 LITERARY FORGERIES

Beast now with beast ’gan war, and fowl with fowl,

And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving

Devoured each other : nor stood much in awe

Of man, but fled him, or with countenance grim

Glared on him passing. (x, 710.)
Lauder took the following translation of these lines
from Hog’s Latin version of Paradise Lost; incor-
porated them in a passage of the Savcotzs of
Massenius; and then declared this translation of
Milton to have been the source of Milton’s own
passage |—

Quadrupedi pugnat quadrupes, volucrique volucris,

Et piscis cum pisce ferox hostilibus armis

Proelia szeva gerit ; jam pristina pabula spernunt

Jam tondere piget viridantes gramine campos,

Alterum et alterius vivunt animalia letho,

Prisca nec in gentem humanam reverentia durat,

Sed fugiunt vel si steterant, fera bella minantur

Fronte truci torvosque oculos jaculantur in illum.

Lauder must have relied on two things: the

improbability of any one procuring a copy of the
Jesuit’s poem, and the still greater improbability of
any one’s referring to so little known a work as
Hog’s translation. But he reckoned without the
Rev. John Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury,
whose suspicions, leading to a search in Hogzus,
were promptly found to be justified. Ina letter to
the Earl of Bath in 1750 Douglas published his
Milton Vindrcated from the Charge of Plagiarism,
and triumphantly exposed to the world the base
devices to which Lauder had resorted.

The reason for Lauder’s hostility to Milton was
THE SHAME OF LAUDER 163

hardly less extraordinary than his method of dis-
playing it. The famous Scotch writer George
Buchanan, who played so conspicuous a part in the
politics of the time of Mary Queen of Scots, had when
travelling in Portugal in early life fallen into the
hands of the Inquisition and been shut up in a
prison. Asa pastime or as a condition of his libera-
tion he there composed in different Latin metres
that admirable paraphrase of the Hebrew Psalms
which was destined to assist the education of so
many generations of Scotchmen. In the following
century Arthur Johnston, for some time physician to
Charles I., published a no less admirable translation
of the Psalms in Latin elegiacs; and it occurred to
Lauder with much reason that Johnston’s translation
would be better adapted for the lower classes in the
Scotch grammar schools than the more difficult
version of Buchanan, Accordingly he published an
edition of Johnston for that purpose, and petitioned
the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland to
recommend its use to the schools. He did not sug-
gest its adoption to the exclusion of Buchanan, but
only its use as a stepping-stone to the ‘full and per-
fect understanding of Buchanan’s more masterly and
sublime but more difficult paraphrase”. The As-
sembly complied with his request, recommending the
use of Buchanan for the higher classes and the
universities (30th November, 1740). About the
same time William Benson, also an admirer of

Johnston, published some fine editions of his Psalms,
Ht *
164 LITERARY FORGERIES

and defended their Latinity as superior to that of
Buchanan.

A bitter literary war ensued in Scotland between
the rival partisans of Buchanan and of Johnston, in
the course of which Lauder wrote to Pope for his
judgment on the greater fitness of Johnston than of
Buchanan for the use of juvenile classes. The poet
vouchsafed no answer, but in the Dzunczad held up
both Benson and Johnston to undeserved ridicule :-—

On two unequal crutches propped he (Benson) came,
Milton on this, on that one Johnston’s name.

The slighting way in which Benson’s patronage of
Johnston was thus compared with his admiration of
Milton proved fatal to Lauder’s hope of ever getting
his edition of Johnston into the schools. ‘‘ From this
time all my praises of Johnston became ridiculous,
and I was censured with great freedom for forcing
upon the schools an author whom Mr. Pope had
mentioned only as a foil to a better poet. On this
occasion it was natural not to be pleased, and my
resentment seeking to discharge itself somewhere
was unhappily directed against Milton. I resolved
to attack his fame.”

These words occur in Lauder’s humble confession
to John Douglas (29th December, 1750), and they
constituted his first line of defence, from which his
second one of a few years later differed considerably.
He asserted the same fact of Pope’s influence in a
letter of apology addressed to the Archbishop of
THE SHAME OF LAUDER 165

Canterbury in 1751: ‘‘ Such was the blind deference
to Mr. Pope that few schoolmasters in Scotland
would receive Johnston’s paraphrase into their schools
after that capricious critic testified his dislike of that
performance by the slighting manner in which he
treated its author in comparison of Milton, whom he
treated as a giant in poetry and the other as a dwarf
or pigmy only”.

This meant for Lauder an annual loss of some
420 or £30a year, aserious inroad on the scanty
resources of a teacher of humanity at Edinburgh in
those days. Lauder, despite his unquestioned abilities,
had been dogged all his life by failure. He had
failed in his candidature both for the post of Professor
of Humanity in Edinburgh (1734) and for the post of
University Librarian. And he failed to obtain the
rectorship of the grammar school at Dundee the very
same year (1742) in which Pope deprived him of all
hope of an income from Johnston. There was nothing
for it but to leave Scotland an embittered man, and
to try in London to eke out such a livelihood as
private tuition and his pen might afford him.

Regarding Milton as the source of his woes he
devoted a large portion of the next four years to
collecting materials for his attack on the fame of the
poet, the result appearing in 1747 in the Gentleman’s
Magazine under the title of Zoilus, the bitter Alex-
andrian critic of Homer. The papers produced an
impression. Richard Richardson replied to Lauder
in a pamphlet entitled Zozlomastix, but his criticism
166 LITERARY FORGERIES

went no farther than challenging the force of the
compared passages; he had no suspicion of the aid
derived from forgery. Dr. Newton in his edition of
Paradise Lost, published in 1749, inserted in his notes
several of the parallelisms from Grotius’ Adamus
Exul, which were afterwards acknowledged to have
been forged.

Towards the end of 1749 Lauder republished the
papers as a whole under the title of dz Essay on
Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his
“ Paradise Lost”, Might not the fraud continue un-
‘detected? Warburton wrote at the time (23rd
December, 1749): “I have just read the most silly
and knavish book I ever saw, one Lauder on Milton’s
imitations. . . . In one view the book does not dis-
please me. It is likely enough to mortify all the
silly adorers of Milton who deserve to be laughed at”
(Nichols, Z2¢. 722, ii. 177). Sir John Hawkins de-
clared that the short preface to the essay, written as if
by the author, was (as was also the postscript) “in-
dubitably written by Dr. Johnson,” then forty-one,
whom he accuses of sympathy with an argument which
he hoped might injure Milton’s reputation. But John-
son can only be fairly convicted of a natural sympathy
with an inquiry of much legitimate interest in itself ;
when the imposition was discovered, Johnson’s indig-
nation was as genuine as that of Lauder’s publishers,
and it was under his dictation that Lauder wrote that
letter of apology to Douglas of which the wonder is
that any one could have survived the writing.
THE SHAME OF LAUDER 167

But Boswell’s remark that Lauder’s passages
produced from other writers bore only ‘‘a faint
resemblance to some parts of Paradise Lost” some-
what understates the case. Lauder always contended
that his case was complete in itself even if “ stript of
all adventitious assistance,” and that the latter was
small in amount. But of twelve passages of resem-
blance cited from Grotius’ Adamus Exul ten consisted
wholly or in part of interpolations of Lauder’s own
composition! As a sample take Milton’s well-known
lines :-—

And in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell,
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Lauder interpolated the following lines into

Grotius as their source :—

Nam, me judice,
Regnare dignum est ambitu, etsi in Tartaro,
Alto presse Tartaro siquidem juvat
Cceli quam in ipsis servi obire munia.

But though Lauder’s passages from Grotius were
of this type, it remains probable that Milton had been
influenced by the tragedy written by Grotius at the
age of eighteen. This was the view taken by Mr.
F. Barham, who in 1839 published the Adamus Exul
of Grotius, or the Prototype of ‘‘ Paradise Lost”.
With an original copy of the Adamus in his hands
he vouched for the general fidelity of Lauder’s ver-
sion, It seems to have been the parent tree (1601)
of all later modern works on the same subject ; being
more or less imitated by Andreini in his Paradiso Per-
168 LITERARY FORGERIES

duto (1613), by Andrew Ramsay in his Sacred Poems
(1633), by Massenius in his Savcotd’s (1650); but,
adds Barham, “by none was it so closely followed,
so admirably emulated and improved upon as by our
Milton”.

Subsequent research has considerably enlarged
the sources which may either have influenced Milton
or have been utilised by him. They are collected in
Hayley’s Conjectures on the Origin of “ Paradise
Lost,” at the end of his life of Milton (1796). Many
of these were unknown to Lauder: such as Marino's
Strage dt gh Innocents (1633), Serafino della Sal-
landra’s Adamo Perduto (1647) and others ; but what
would Lauder not have given to have known the
Lucifer of the Dutch poet Vondel, of whose later
discovered relation to Milton a modern writer has
said: ‘“ The very large use which he (Milton) made
without acknowledgment of the ideas and language
of a distinguished contemporary, from works but
recently published and written in a tongue unknown
to the vast majority of English readers, cannot be
altogether excused or defended”? (Edmundson’s
Milton and Vondel, 191). Undoubtedly Lauder
would have used stronger language than Mr.
Edmundson. And in any case his shade must look
with satisfaction on the tardy but general acceptance
of his denial of the absolute originality of Milton,
which before his unscrupulous onslaught had been an
article of faith in the world of English letters.

Lauder prevailed on the Archbishop of Canter-
THE SHAME OF LAUDER 169

bury to forgive him the imposition practised on his
Grace in common with lesser mortals who had as-
sisted the author in the original publication. Under
the archiepiscopal patronage he was suffered to pub-
lish his Delectus auctorum sacrorum Miltono facem
prelucenttum, which contained Andrew Ramsay’s
Sacra Poemata in four books of Latin hexameters,
and the Adamus Exul of Grotius (1752). But it
was too late then with any chance of success to run a
fresh tilt against Milton.

Time, however, failed to cool his animosity against
the poet who had so unwittingly injured his liveli-
hood. In 1754 he came forward with a fresh charge
against Milton, and at the same time with a fresh
justification of his own frauds. We hear no more in
his Charles I. Vindicated (1754) of Pope, nor of
Johnston’s Psalms. He now claims to have com-
mitted his frauds with the express hope of detection.
For such detection was to have enabled him to bring
with all the greater force a similar charge of forgery
against Milton. Only so could he have effectively
charged Milton with tampering with the publication
of the Azkon Bastike, and with interpolating it at
the end with the prayer, as being the king’s, which is
borrowed almost verbally from Pamela’s prayer in
Sidney’s Arcadia.

Milton’s motive, according to Lauder, was, by
discrediting the royal authorship of the prayers
appended to the “zon, to discredit the royal author-
ship of the whole work. “As Milton by that im-
170 LITERARY FORGERIES

posture could easily prove that the king was not the
author of this prayer, so he meant that an inference
should be drawn that he was not the author of the
treatise itself.”

For this story of Milton forcing Dugard, the
schoolmaster-printer, caught in the act of printing the
LEtkon, to subjoin to it Pamela’s prayer, Lauder cites
as his authority three letters, two of which were first
quoted by T. Wagstaffe in 1697 in his Vendzcatzon
of Charles I., and subsequently printed by Dr. T.
Birch in his Appendix to his Lzfe of Milton (1738).
But the first edition of Wagstaffe’s Vindzcatzon in
1693 is without the letters, and their late date makes
them suspicious. One is a letter from Dr. Gill to
Charles Hatton, dated 1st May, 1694, in which
Gill, physician for several years to Hills, Cromwell’s
printer, refers to Hills as telling him how Milton
used his influence with Bradshaw to relieve Dugard
from further penalty for printing the Zzkoz on condi-
tion of his adding to it Pamela’s prayer. The other
is a letter, which Wagstaffe declared to be in his own
possession, from Dr. Francis Bernard, who was also
a physician to Hills, and who also heard from him
the same story (10th May, 1694). Dr. Birch quotes
a third letter from Bernard to Dr. Goodall to the
same effect, dated 13th March, 1693, but not derived
from Wagstaffe. In his second edition of Milton’s
Life (1753) Dr. Birch withdrew his credit from the
story on the ground that it rested only on the hearsay
evidence of Hills.
THE SHAME OF LAUDER 171

Certain it is that Dugard suffered for printing the
Evtkon, and some other works in the Royalist interest.
He was committed to Newgate; his presses were
destroyed ; he was dismissed from the mastership of
the Merchant Taylors’ School, and his wife and
children were turned out of doors. The fact is at-
tested by the Stationer’s Preface to Gauden’s Crom-
well’s Bloody Slaughter-house (July, 1660), and by an
affidavit by Dugard at the Record Office (October,
1661). But the latter (if it may be trusted) adds
the information that it was Sir James Harrington
who saved Dugard from being tried for his life ;
there is no mention of Milton in it at all. This fact
alone would seem to discredit the letters against
Milton, first published by Wagstaffe, and their ap-
pearance at a time, when so much doubtful testimony
was eagerly collected in favour of King Charles and
of his authorship of the Azon, tends still further to
deprive them of value. But Lauder was no more
to blame for believing the story than was Dr. Birch
in his first edition. Birch in fact was Lauder’s au-
thority. The story itself at least gave a plausible
account of the presence in the Zzon of Pamela’s
prayer, and no other story has ever been given to
account for it. The prayer found no place in the
first edition, nor in several of the editions both of
1648 (Old Style) and 1649, but it is present in one
edition of 1648, and the question has never been
satisfactorily answered how it came to be there.

If we refer to Milton’s own language in his
172 LITERARY FORGERIES

Evkonoctastes about this puzzling prayer, it appears
inconceivable that he could have been himself re-
sponsible for its presence in the Ezkon, Let the
reader judge for himself whether the poet’s indigna-
tion, however excessive it may now seem, has not
all the stamp of sincerity: ‘This king,” writes
Milton, ‘not content with that which although in a
thing holy is no holy theft, to attribute to his own
making other men’s whole prayers, hath as it were
unhallowed and unchristened the very duty of prayer
itself by borrowing to a Christian use prayers offered
to a heathen god. Who would have imagined so
little fear in him of the true all-seeing Deity .. . as
immediately before his death to pop into that grave
bishop who attended him for a special relique of his
saintly exercises a prayer stolen word for word from
the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen
god; and that in no serious book but the vain ama-
torious poem of Sir Philip Sidney’s Avcadza?” “He
whose mind could serve him to seek a Christian
prayer out of a pagan legend, and assume it for his
- own, might gather up the rest God knows where.”
Again he alludes to the king’s ‘bankrupt de-
votion” which ‘‘came not honestly by his very
prayers, but, having sharked them from the mouth
of a heathen worshipper, sold them to those that
stood and honoured him next to the Messiah as his
own heavenly compositions in adversity, for hopes
no less vain and presumptuous than by these goodly
relics to be held a saint and martyr with the cheated
THE SHAME OF LAUDER 173

people” (from Baron’s edition of the Ezkonoclastes
of 1750, from the second edition of 1650).

In all this there is an evident desire to use
Pamela’s prayer as morally discreditable to the
Ekon and its supposed royal author, but there is no
more than a hint of using the prayer as throwing
doubt on the authorship itself. But even so it is not
pleasant to think of Milton, as alleged, foisting this
prayer into the Zzou in order to have wherewithal
to lash himself into a fury of righteous indignation
against the lately executed king. One cannot think
it of him, even when allowing for the disturbed state
of public feeling at the time and for a possible desire
to employ any weapon to check the tide of a Royalist
reaction. Yet the question cannot be so disposed
of; it must remain a matter of evidence, of which,
as collected by Lauder, all that can be said is that,
coming from so bitter a source, it is not conclusive.
The presence of the prayer in the Zzfon must re-
main an unsolved, and possibly an insoluble, mystery.

In his preface to Charles I. Vindicated Lauder
wrote thus of his literary misdemeanour: “ Few
men have ever incurred so much infamy and ruin
as I by this rash or if you please unwarrantable zeal
for our abused sovereign”. But this must be regarded
as an afterthought, as an attempt to rehabilitate him-
self in public esteem by an appeal to Royalist senti-
ment. The attempt was unsuccessful; the public
was deaf to anything further that might be said by
Lauder. From that time he disappeared from the
174 LITERARY FORGERIES

world’s stage. He went finally to the West Indies,
where he died in destitute circumstances, and at an
advanced age, which cannot be accurately stated; a
man of high ability and of wide learning, who wrecked
his life to gratify an inordinate passion of literary
resentment. There is no case quite like Lauder’s
in the history of literature, for it is generally against
living rather than dead authors that feelings of pas-
sionate animosity are aroused. Milton, though dead,
was a greater object of hatred to Lauder than were
any of his living contemporaries,
CHAPTER X.
THE FORGED LETTERS OF BYRON AND SHELLEY.

Ir was some time in the summer of 1848 that a
young lady called on Mr. White, the bookseller in
Pall Mall, and offered him two autograph letters of
Lord Byron, which belonged to her elder sister, an
invalid, living with her at St. John’s Wood. The
sister wished to sell them in order to meet a tempo-
rary difficulty caused by the defalcation of an agent.
The sisters were the daughters of a surgeon, lately
dead, who had attended Fletcher, Lord Byron’s valet,
in his last illness, and from him received certain
books which the poet had given as a dying gift to
his faithful servant.

The story seeming as plausible as its teller
seemed artless and candid, Mr. White bought the
letters, and several others at subsequent visits, also
by Lord Byron. Then it transpired that the sister
had also some letters of Shelley, but with these and
the books left by Fletcher to her father she was most
reluctant to part. Still if she was compelled to part
with them, she would rather they should pass as a
whole to Mr, White than that they should be dis-

75
176 LITERARY FORGERIES

persed among a number of purchasers. So Mr.
White gradually became possessed of the whole
collection.

Mr. White speaks of this lady’s visits continuing
‘over a space of some months,” and it is important
to notice, with regard to his part in the story, that
all his dealings with the lady were completed before
the end of the year 1848. Mr. Sotheby says:
“Very shortly after Mr. White had become possessed
of all the MSS. and letters, the sale of the collection
of autograph letters by the late Mr. Hodges took
place,” and 18th December, 1848, was the date of
sale (Principia Typographica, ii., 105, 109). Mr.
White’s own narrative clearly represents the whole
transaction as completed before that sale, though
Mr. White makes no mention of its date.

It must have been during the latter months of
1848 that Mr. White acquainted Mr. Murray, the
publisher, with his acquisition of these Byron letters,
and Mr. Moxon, the publisher, with the acquisition
of certain letters by Shelley and Keats. Mr. Murray,
who had published the seventeen-volume edition
of Lord Byron’s letters, journals and life, was natu-
rally interested, and finally there came a day when,
after devoting two hours of study to the forty-seven
Byron letters in the possession of Mr. White, who
would not suffer him to take them to his own house,
Mr. Murray agreed to buy them for the sum of
4123 7s. 6d.; at the rate, that is, of two and a half
guineas apiece. The receipt was dated 28th April,
THE FORGED LETTERS 177

1849. As no one, from his professional connexion
with Lord Byron, knew better than Mr. Murray the
peculiarities of the handwriting and of the signature
of Lord Byron, Mr. Murray’s purchase of the letters
seemed to Mr. White to settle any possible doubts
of their genuineness, and to free him from any neces-
sity of informing Mr. Murray from whom he had
acquired them.

No one who has seen these forty-seven letters in
the Manuscript Room of the British Museum (Ad-
ditional Manuscripts, 19,377) will be surprised at
either Mr. White’s or Mr. Murray’s acceptance of
them. The correspondence consists of letters to
Douglas Kinnaird, Sir G. Webster and Sir James
Mackintosh, Colonel Hay, Shelley and others be-
tween 1812 and 1824. The letters have the foreign
postmarks of Venice, Ravenna, or Pisa, as the case
may be; the seals, the addresses, the handwriting,
the signature, all seem to be above suspicion.

But it is the tone and style of these letters no
less than the actual handwriting which are so marvel-
lously Byronic. The characteristic wit and bitter-
ness of the poet are absent from none of the letters,
and such internal evidence was decidedly in favour
of their genuineness. Take, for example, this to Sir
J. Mackintosh :—

“Rhyming is as easy as punning to one who
will allow his thoughts to run more by the associa-
tions of sound than of sense. . . . Sometime in the

course of his life, under the influence of love, mad-
12
178 LITERARY FORGERIES

ness, or some other calamity, almost every one is
silly enough to sin in rhyme.”

Or to Kinnaird about an incident in Galignani :-—

“Because an accident happened to occur the
other day by a horse taking fright at the squeaking
of Mr. Punch, some of these strait-waistcoat-mongers
are for having our merry old friend put down by Act
of Parliament.”

It is only, however, by a perusal of the whole
collection that a real idea can be formed of their
extraordinarily life-like character—a character which
could only have been impressed upon them by great
ability combined with an intimate knowledge of the
poet’s actual life. Both these qualifications belonged
in an eminent degree to the supposed writer of the
letters, Icodad George Gordon Byron, who claimed
to be the natural son of the poet by a Spanish lady
and who supported his claim by a very remarkable
facial resemblance.

There seems no reason to doubt that this Byron
had taken great pains to collect materials for a new
Life of his alleged father; he had travelled abroad
with this object, and had solicited letters of Lord
Byron from all probable quarters. Early in 1848 he
had notified in the press this forthcoming Life, con-
taining unpublished letters of the poet, to which he
had had access through the kindness of Mrs. Leigh,
the poet’s sister. But unfortunately on 1st April,
1848, this said Mrs. Leigh wrote a letter to the
Atheneum, denying such access on the part of Byron,
THE FORGED LETTERS 179

and throwing doubt on his claim to be the son of the
poet. A letter from a firm of solicitors of 24th
March, 1848, also drew attention to the falsity of
some of Byron’s pretensions, and consequently the
projected Life was never published in England. It
would appear that it was shortly after this exposure
that the lady paid her first visit to Mr. White, with
a view to turning the letters to profitable account.

But even after the forty-seven letters had been
sold to Mr. White, Byron persevered with his in-
tention of bringing out a Life of his father. In August,
1849, he returned to America, and there again noti-
fied to the world a most attractive work: The [n-
edited Works of Lord Byron, now first published
Srom his letters, journals, and other manuscripts, tn
the possession of hts son Major George Gordon
Byron. The work was to come out in twenty
monthly parts, beginning 1st October, 1849. In
this announcement, signed by George Gordon Byron,
Publisher, 237 Broadway, New York, Byron claimed
to possess about 1,000 letters of the poet, and his
Ravenna Journal of 1822. The two first numbers
duly appeared, but most of his materials had been
left in England, and his inability to obtain them caused
the work to be discontinued, and threw Byron into a
state of despair.

It was indeed no common work that Byron had
projected, nor any common industry that he had be-
stowed upon its completion. ‘“ Every book he could

meet with,” says Mr. Sotheby, “containing matter
12*
180 LITERARY FORGERIES

that could be turned to account by him, was carefully
read by him; all the various periodicals of the time
were ransacked; no source of information he could
in any way obtain was neglected.” Had the book
only been successfully launched, it would have gone
far to bring its author both fame and fortune.

But Byron had a wife, who it seems reasonable
to suppose accompanied him to America in August,
1849. And it must have been some time in 1848
that Mr. White had made the discovery that his
mysterious lady, who had sold him the letters, was
none other than Mrs. Byron. There was no invalid
sister nor a surgeon in the case at all. Mr. White
tells us how, his suspicions being aroused, he
challenged the lady’s story, and how she confessed ;
and how the next day Byron himself came with his
wife ; showed him in print part of his father’s Life ;
said he had bought many of his Byron letters from
Mr. Hodges of Frankfurt and of Mr. Wright of the
Quarterly Review; had acquired the books from
Fletcher ; and the Shelley letters in various ways,
some of them from the box left behind at Marlow
when Shelley moved from that place. He also
signed a written attestation of their genuineness,

This appears to have satisfied Mr. White, in
spite of the false story of which he had been the
victim. Otherwise it is impossible to account for
his having sold to Mr. Murray some months after
his discovery of Byron, and without any allusion to
him, letters acquired under conditions so suspicious.
THE FORGED LETTERS 181

It is no less surprising to find him a year later,
in August, 1850, sending to Messrs. Sotheby to be
sold by auction the Shelley letters which he had ob-
tained from the same tainted source that had supplied
him with the Byron letters. Besides these were
books enriched with Byron’s signature and notes,
and also seven letters and a poem by Keats. The
sale took place in the May of 1851, and resulted in
some very high prices; Mr. Moxon, the publisher,
being the happy purchaser of the Shelley letters for
Al15 4s. 6d.

At the same sale were some scandalous letters
from Shelley to his wife, containing unfilial state-
ments about the poet’s father. These were probably
the letters which Mr. White, acting under Mr.
Moxon’s advice, had previously tried to dispose of
to Mrs. Shelley, incurring her wrath for what she
thought was an attempt to extort money, and these
were bought in by Sir Percy Shelley and never
became public.

But with those bought by Mr. Moxon it was
otherwise. In 1852 Mr. Moxon ushered into the
world a most interesting little book of Letters of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, with an Introductory Essay by
Robert Browning. The letters were twenty-five in
number, covering the years between 1811 and 1821,
and Browning’s marvellous Introduction constituted
a fourth part of the volume. It is full of incoherent
language and of strange metaphors, as where we
read of a poet “who shall at once replace this in-
182 LITERARY FORGERIES

tellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago by
a supply of the fresh and living swathe,” but all that
Browning claimed to do was to facilitate the writing
of Shelley's biography “by arranging these few
supplementary letters, with a recognition of the value
of the whole collection”. This value he took to con-
sist in the “ most truthful conformity of the Corre-
spondence, in its limited degree, with the moral and
intellectual character of the writer as displayed in
the highest manifestations of his genius”.

But alas! for human fallibility ; for this ‘“ most
truthful conformity,” proving that Shelley’s poetical
mood was “only the intensification of his habitual
mood,” had nothing to do with Shelley at all. It
was probably all due to the clever hand and brain of
George Gordon Byron. Twenty-three out of these
twenty-five letters are bound up in the same volume
with the Byron letters in the British Museum.
Though written by the same hand they are in a
totally different handwriting from the Byron letters,
being of course as true to that of Shelley as they are
to his tone and habit of thought. They seemed to
stand every test; they were written from places
where Shelley was known to have been at the dates
prefixed to them. Mr. Moxon had accepted them
as genuine; what reason had Browning to doubt
them?

Indeed it was due to pure chance that any one
ever came to doubt them. Moxon happened to send
a copy of the published letters to Tennyson; Pal-
THE FORGED LETTERS 183

grave happened to be staying with Tennyson; and
in turning over the leaves, Palgrave appened to re-
cognise a passage which he remembered as occurring
in a Quarterly Review article by his father, Sir
Francis Palgrave, so long ago as the year 1840.
The details appeared in the Literary Gazette of
28th February, 1852, and were sent to that periodical
after a most favourable notice of the letters in the
preceding number (21st Feb.) wherein the letters had
been described as “charming and valuable”. It is
somewhat startling to think that but for the coinci-
dence of all these unlikely contingencies the forged
Shelley letters might have furnished material for a
falsified biography of him to the end of time.

No sooner had Mr. Moxon become aware of the
fraud than he suppressed the publication, and called
in the copies he had issued to the trade. Detection in
this case had come speedily. It wason 21st February,
1852, that the Atheneum had published a review of
the book, and on 6th March it cried out ‘‘ Forgery ”.
All the letters, with one or two unspecified excep-
tions, it pronounced to be fabrications. The post-
marks on the letters had been compared with those
on Byron’s genuine letters, sent to Mr. Murray from
the same places and at the same dates, and it had
been discovered that the postmarks from Venice and
Ravenna on the Shelley letters differed intrinsi-
cally from those on the genuine letters.

More important and conclusive was the discovery
that the following characteristic passage in a letter
184 LITERARY FORGERIES

from Shelley to Graham had been taken, with hardly
the change of a word, from an article entitled
“ Thoughts on Bores” by a Bore, in /azus, an Edin-
burgh Literary Almanac of the year 1826 (p. 73) :—

“But the cerulean blue—the true celestial—she
who really has heaven in her eye, follow her to the
world’s end. Loveher! Adoreher! You must and
will. Win her and wear her if you can. She is the
most delightful of God’s creatures—Heaven’s best
gift; man’s joy and pride in prosperity ; man’s sup-
port and comforter in affliction. I know there are
unbelievers who would class my true celestials among
fabulous creatures. I own they are rare.”

It is, however, to be noted in the interests of those
who may possess or who may acquire this instructive
little volume that the twenty-third letter in the series
to Keats, advising and inviting him to spend the
winter in Italy, is a genuine Shelley letter. At least
a Westminster reviewer declared himself to have
been the possessor of such a letter for many years, a
copy of it having been printed by him in an article
on Keats in the Brztzsh Quarterly for November, 1848
(Westminster Review, April, 1852, 503).

The suggestion that Byron simply copied this
letter is hardly consistent with the fact that, if he had
not already sold his Shelley letters to Mr. White
before November, 1848, it was about that time that he
sold them. A forger would be needlessly bold who
would take from a magazine of the current quarter
such a letter as this one to Keats to palm off ona pur-
THE FORGED LETTERS 185

chaser. By what means this letter to Keats found
its way into the collection remains a mystery.

The letter also, No. 10, to Thomas Hookham,
dated 3rd August, 1816, is, like the letter to Keats,
absent from the collection presented to the British
Museum by Mr. White.

This double exposure of plagiarism was of course
fatal to the credit of the Shelley letters, and almost fatal
to that of Mr. White, against whom the Atheneum
had made some caustic remarks, almost insinuating
that he had been a party to the fraud. To this charge
Mr. White replied in a printed letter to Mr. Murray,
dated 11th March, 1852, and published under the title
of Calumntes of the ‘Atheneum Journal” Exposed,
He explained his share in the transaction, and how
completely he had been deceived by ‘‘the speciousness
and the simplicity ” of the lady who had brought him
these literary pearls. But he omitted to mention the
date at which good reasons had occurred for his
suspecting the genuineness of the Byron letters he
had sold to Mr. Murray. His main contention was
that letters which had deceived such authorities as
Mr. Murray and Mr. Moxon made excusable the
deception of himself.

To this the Atheneum replied, that the whole
trouble would have been avoided had Mr. White
once mentioned to either publisher the name of the
pseudo-Byron. And, whilst acquitting Mr. White of
having been an accomplice of Byron, it pointed out
that Mr. White must have sold for some 300 guineas
186 LITERARY FORGERIES

what had not cost himself more than 100. It is due,
however, to Mr. White’s memory to add that he
ultimately repaid to Mr. Murray and Mr. Moxon the
sums they had paid for the forgeries.

Mr. Murray also replied to Mr. White in a letter
dated 17th March, 1852, and printed in the Literary
Gazette of 20th March. He denied that he had
known anything of the connexion of Byron with the
letters ; had he done so, he would have hesitated to
buy them. “I cannot account,” he went on, “for
your conduct in concealing from me all mention of
his name until the week before last when I called on
you to tell you that I had ascertained that they were
forgeries.”

From which are deducible two strange facts in this
strange story: (1) that Mr. White sold the letters to
Mr. Murray without mentioning that the lady, whose
manner had been “so artless, open and candid,” as
to disarm all his anxiety, had been ascertained by
himself to be the wife of a notoriously suspicious liter-
ary character ; (2) that Mr. Murray, having bought
the letters in April, 1849, did not discover till March,
1852, that they were forgeries.

It remains extremely difficult to reconcile Mr.
White’s asseverations of his innocence in the matter
with the facts as given in his own defence—a defence
which is marked by a remarkable avoidance of all
dates. Knowing the trickery that had been prac-
tised on himself, and with misgivings clearly aroused
by such knowledge, he ought never to have sold the
THE FORGED LETTERS 187

Byron letters to Murray in 1849, nor in 1850 have
sent the letters of Shelley and Keats and the re-
mainder of his purchases to be sold by auction,
The life as well as the origin of Byron remain
shrouded in considerable mystery. It would seem
that his claim to bean illegitimate son of Lord Byron
was first made in a letter to Mr. Murray, dated ist
July, 1843, written from Pennsylvania. Only embar-
rassing circumstances compelled him to disclose to a
friend of the late Lord Byron the secret of his birth.
His mother had belonged to an old noble Spanish
family, and, though a Catholic herself, had consigned
her son to a Protestant tutor to be educated as a Pro-
testant. Then came years at college which “ glided
away in unperturbed tranquillity”. From Paris he re-
turned to Spain with ‘‘an indescribable passion for ad-
venture from childhood which it required even the
stimulus of danger to satisfy”. Then his mother died,
leaving him only her diamonds; after which he started
on a pilgrimage to all the places “rendered sacred
by the temporary residence of Lord Byron”. From
Greece he roved over the East ; ‘from the city of the
Sultan to the Pyramids and Cataracts of the Nile;
from Mount Ararat to the mouth of the Ganges”.
Returning thence to Spain, Byron took some part in
the political struggles of that country, but after disap-
pointment in this direction he went to America, where
he bought a farm near Wilkes Barre in the classic
valley of Wyoming. For a time everything promised
fair, till a sudden commercial crisis deprived him of
188 LITERARY FORGERIES

the little fortune he had left, and compelled him to
appeal to the friends of Lord Byron for a loan to pay
the next instalment of the purchase-money of his farm.

Such a letter with such a claim belongs to a not
unfamiliar type, and the amount of truth in it cannot
be gauged. But the marvellous resemblance of his
features and to some extent of his handwriting with
those of Lord Byron undoubtedly lent countenance
to his story, and Mr. Sotheby, who was sceptical at
first, inclined ultimately to the opinion that Byron
was really the son of the poet.

Actual proof that Byron was himself the forger of
the Byron and Shelley letters is wanting. The simi-
larity of his handwriting to that of Lord Byron, as
shown in the facsimiles given in Mr. Sotheby’s Pr7x-
cipra Typographica, is perhaps not more than super-
ficial. Mr. Sotheby was convinced in 1855 that all
the forgeries were in one handwriting, but the Byron
letters and the Shelley letters, to which must be
added seven from Keats, were of course in the
writing of their supposed authors, and therefore as
different from one another as possible. Only the
verdict of an expert in handwriting would avail to
prove that all these letters were really in one hand-
writing, and such a verdict has never been given.

The trick and the falsehood employed by Byron
in disposing of these letters to Mr. White raises of
course the strongest suspicion against him, but for
many years before that Byron had troubled all sorts
of people for letters of Lord Byron: a proceeding
THE FORGED LETTERS 189

hardly compatible with either the ability or the in-
tention to produce such letters by forgery. Byron
always claimed to have acquired by such solicitation
or purchase about a thousand of Byron’s letters, and,
if this were true, he can have been under no absolute
necessity to forge any, though pecuniary temptation
may have led him to do so. It is known that Byron
lived for some time in the same house with Mr.
Wright, who had acted as sub-editor for Mr.
Murray’s edition of Lord Byron, and he may easily
have received from Mr. Wright some Byronic
letters which had been rejected as spurious. Al-
though therefore the case is highly suspicious against
Byron, it is not absolutely conclusive : the possibility
cannot be precluded that in his search for autograph
letters he was, like most collectors, himself the vic-
tim of the fraud of others.

In Sotheby’s Sale Catalogue for May, 1851, may
be found the titles of the works sold and the prices
given for them by their several buyers in that mem-
orable week’s sale which began on 12th May. In-
teresting in the light of later knowledge are the
auctioneers’ comments on these highly prized letters
of Shelley and Keats, especially on those eleven
letters to Mrs. Shelley which were bought in by the
Shelley family for 457 15s. The presumption
is that, if the letters bought by Mr. Moxon were
forgeries, these would fall under the same condem-
nation, whether forged by Byron or by some person
unknown; but the fact remains undecided.
190 LITERARY FORGERIES

The seven letters of Keats fell into different
hands, being sold for £13 19s. Lord Houghton
bought a few of them, and also a poem, which he
subsequently published, as of doubtful authenticity,
in an appendix to his Lzfe and Letters of Keats
(360). If not authentic, he wrote, it was a clever
imitation, and Lord Houghton leant to the opinion
that it was authentic, and contended that it was un-
just to condemn as fraudulent all that had been sold
on that famous occasion.

The whole story affords a standing warning
against the pleasant folly of collecting autographs.
Assuming these letters to have been forged, they
are miraculous illustrations of what can be accom-
plished in that line. They prove that artificial
literature can be produced as readily as artificial
pearls, to the deceiving even of the ablest experts.
No one living knew the handwriting of Byron and
Shelley better than Mr. Murray and Mr. Moxon
respectively, yet they were completely deceived by a
resemblance which applied not merely to the actual
handwriting but to the very minds of the two authors
who were imitated.

The discovery of the fraud was due rather to
hazard than to the sagacity of any one concerned.
What hope can there be therefore for the ordinary
collector or buyer of such wares?
CHAPTER XI.
A GERMAN FORGER: FRIEDRICH WAGENFELD.

A BREAST of triple brass must be his who ventures
on an imposition with the learned world in Germany.
Yet this boldness must be placed to the credit of
Wagenfeld, who in his twenty-fifth year (1835) tried
to palm off on his contemporaries a work which, had
it only been genuine, would have constituted the
greatest historical discovery of the nineteenth cen-
tury.

Wagenfeld had been a student of theology and
philosophy at Gottingen for four years (1829-1832),
and in the course of his studies had doubtless be-
come acquainted with the Avangelica Preparatio
of Eusebius. In the first book of this work are
somewhat copious extracts from Porphyry’s lost
work against the Christians, containing passages from
an alleged Greek translation by Philo Byblius of the
nine books of the history composed by the Phenician
Sanchoniathon.

Sanchoniathon (whose name meant the Lover of
Truth) had, in a time before the Trojan War, col-
lected all the ancient history of Phenicia from monu-

ments supplied by its several towns, and had related
Igt
192 LITERARY FORGERIES

with the greatest exactitude all that related to the
Jews from the memoirs of the priest Jerombal. This
history had been dedicated to Abibal, King of Bery-
tus, and after examination by alleged competent judges
accepted as true. It was this history which Philo
Byblius had translated from Phenician into Greek.

Eusebius quotes extracts from Philo’s preface to
the first book of his translation, telling how San-
choniathon had studied the writings of Taautos, the
inventor of letters, and the secret writings of the
Ammonians; and then gives several most interest-
ing pages about the cosmogony and theology of the
Phenicians. But there is unfortunately nothing more
in Eusebius of Sanchoniathon’s history.

Here therefore was a gap in the history of the
world that sorely needed closing up. What would
the world not give to know more about the early
history of that great and mysterious Phenician race?
What would it not give to possess again in its en-
tirety the lost books of Philo’s translation of San-
choniathon (assuming that such a work had ever
existed). And in the thirties of the last century the
researches of the learned Gesenius at Gottingen had
renewed public interest in the history of Phenicia.

What finer opportunity could have been offered
to a man of vivid imagination and of irreproachable
Greek scholarship? But imagine a young man of
twenty-five not quailing before the task of reproduc-
ing in Greek the lost books of Philo’s translation
adapted to the model of the few pages in Greek
A GERMAN FORGER 193

preserved of Philo in Eusebius, Yet it was no less
a task than this to which young Wagenfeld ad-
dressed himself: surely one of the boldest literary
labours ever undertaken. And, if anything could
have justified the attempt, it was the ability displayed
in it,

Wagenfeld appears to have begun his assault on
German credulity by a letter to G. H. Pertz, the
celebrated historian, dated 18th October, 1835, pur-
porting to have come from Oporto, from a certain
John Pereiro, knight. It was written in Latin, and
told how in the monastery of Santa Maria de Merin-
hao, situated between the rivers Duero and Minho,
the complete nine books of Philo’s translation, of
which Eusebius had only preserved the imperfect
remains of one, had been found in a perfect state.
The writer begged that the learned world should be
acquainted with news of the discovery. On 30th
October, 1835, the Hanover Zeztumg announced it.

This was followed by a second Latin letter from
Pereiro to Wagenfeld in November of the same year,
purporting to send the MS., but asking him not to
publish it at present, except in an epitome, and to
show the Greek MS. to no one. The reason was,
that the happy finder was at some difference with
the monks, who, willing at first to let Pereiro have
the MS. for a mere trifle, had raised their price to
450. But this letter was signed Pereira, not Pereiro.

Wagenfeld’s connexion with Pereiro was sup-

posed to have been made through Pereiro’s nephew,
ug
194 LITERARY FORGERIES

who was said to have resided at Bremen during the
summer of 1835 and to have helped Wagenfeld to
learn Portuguese. What then more natural than for
the nephew to inform Wagenfeld of his uncle’s
wonderful discovery, or for the uncle, on his nephew’s
advice, to send Wagenfeld the work? The MS.
had been found not in the library of the cloister,
but in a box in a cupboard of the room in which
Pereiro chanced to be lodging. Three other MSS.,
afterwards corrected by the uncle to thirteen, had
also been found in the same wonderful box.

These facts appeared in a letter to the publishing
firm of the brothers Hahn at Hanover, dated 16th
January, 1836. Wagenfeld’s first letter to them,
suggesting the publication of the more important
parts of the discovered translation, was dated 2oth
December, 1835, and was signed Wilde. Ina subse-
quent letter, when he had succeeded in persuading
the learned Oriental scholar G. L. Grotefend to
write a preface to his epitome of Sanchoniathon, he
excused himself for having used his mother’s name
for a pseudonym ; he could not find it in his conscience
to let “the worthy Director Grotefend” sign his name
to a work issued pseudonymously. And in another
letter of January, whilst expressing regret that the
injunctions of Pereiro prevented him from sending
Grotefend the Greek MS., he alluded to his readi-
ness to send him two other MSS., if Grotefend was
interested in medizeval literature. One of these was
a copy of the Sachsenspiegel in Low German of the
A GERMAN FORGER 195

fourteenth century ; the other was a hymn to the
Virgin by “poor Conrad”.

It appears from a letter to Grotefend himself of
27th February, 1836, that the first of these was
actually sent to him by Wagenfeld. He sentit asa
sign of his gratitude for the kind reception Grotefend
had vouchsafed to his Phenician discovery. Was it
one of the thirteen MSS. found in the same box with
the Philo Byblius? In that case it looks as if Wagen-
feld had contemplated a whole series of forgeries to
follow the one already in hand; but his memory is
so heavily burdened with the forgery he accomplished
that those which never emerged from conception
may be suffered to lie lightly upon him.

By the middle of April Grotefend was in pos-
session of Wagenfeld’s epitome, together with a
short facsimile of the clearly preserved Greek ori-
ginal. The preface he wrote is dated 24th May,
1836, and its connexion with the “ Early History of
the Phenicians” (Urgeschichte der Phenizier) affords
a melancholy but amusing illustration of the occa-
sional fallibility of the learned. For Grotefend, one
of the most learned men of his time, was completely
deceived. He expressed his delight at the discovery
of this oldest known history of Phenicia. There was
no name, no incident, in Wagenfeld’s purely fictitious
history which he did not accept with the most child-
like faith. Some of the Phenician legends, he argued,
must have been the source of certain passages in

Genesis. A certain hymn over Sidon, in which that
13 *
196 LITERARY FORGERIES

city is compared to a pearl or to a star fallen from
heaven, was comparable, in his esteem, to the prophet
Ezekiel’s song over the fall of Tyre. Only the Phe-
nician poetry struck him as being of higher order
than might have been expected of so commercial a
people: it had a marked tendency to the elegiac.
He appears in short to have accepted the forgery,
not only implicitly but with enthusiasm.

For him the story was true of King Joram having
an account of the Phenician expedition to Ceylon
(which was identified of course with Ophir) inscribed
ona pillar in the temple of Melicertes at Tyre; whereon
was also inscribed a most elaborate account of the
military strength of the various cities and colonies of
Phenicia, and some account of the countries they
traded with. Joram had four copies of this inscrip-
tion taken and sent to other cities. But when an
earthquake had destroyed the pillar, and the four
copies had also perished, Sanchoniathon resolved to
copy it verbatim from the fallen pillar. This copy
was called ‘“‘the Periplus of Joram,” and Wagenfeld
had felt it to be so important that he gave it word
for word in German in the eighth book of Sanchoni-
athon.

This Phenician writer was now discovered to
have been the son of Kusabas, and the grandson of
Okalathon, both writers to the king; and he wrote
his history about the middle of the ninth century B.c. '
In this he frequently referred to his sources and
authorities, such as the Books of Taaut, the Deeds of
A GERMAN FORGER 197

Bethebalus, the Songs of Nama, and so forth. And
he told some wonderful things : of Titans, half-naked
savages, who obtained white horses from Media, and
worshipped them as gods, and whom Grotefend readily
identified with certain people mentioned by Ezekiel ;
of giants who frequently fought with the Phenicians,
and on one occasion were destroyed by fire from
heaven ; of two marvellous horses, called Dolixurus
and Mira; of a miraculous equestrian virgin; of a
priest of Saturn who in the reign of Garusaus lived for
many years without touching food ; of another priest
of Egyptian origin who was the inventor of scythed
chariots for use in war; of King Leonturgus who
used to go round the watch at night and kill any
sentinels he might find drunk; of Damascon, an
exile from Egypt, who fought for King Bimalus and
afterwards founded the city of Damascus.

There were the names of all the kings of Sidon
and of Byblos for a long period. Grotefend drew up
a list of twenty-one kings of Sidon, and of fifteen in
Byblos, and attempted a comparative chronology of
their dates. He was also able from the “ Periplus”
to draw up an accurate table of the total military and
naval resources of all the Phenician cities and of their
colonies ; of the latter there were ten in number, four
in Rhodes, two in Cyprus, two in Liguria, one in
Malta and one in Crete. All which would have
been vastly interesting and a valuable addition to the
knowledge of the world, if only it had been true.
One can imagine the inventor’s glee at having his
198 LITERARY FORGERIES

astonishing history accepted as undoubtedly genuine
by such an authority as G. F. Grotefend.

But Grotefend’s son, Karl Ludwig, did not share
his father’s easy faith, He published in September,
1836, a short but pertinent pamphlet, called Zhe
Sanchoniathon Question, in which he printed all the
letters which had been written in connexion with
the supposed Phenician find: two Latin letters from
the supposed Portuguese Pereiro; seven letters from
Wagenfeld, either in his own name or under the
pseudonym of Wilde, to the publishers Hahn; and
one from Wagenfeld to Grotefend, his father. This
collection of hitherto unpublished letters went far to
ruin the forgery.

But the elder Grotefend was not the only one to
believe at first in the false Sanchoniathon. Gesenius,
his equal in learning, who had published learned
works on Phenicia, told Wagenfeld in a letter that
he considered it almost impossible that the work
could be a forgery. He was much struck by the
identity of many of the proper names in Wagenfeld’s
work with real Phenician names, such as he himself
had found on inscriptions. This would have been
remarkable in itself, had it not been explicable by
the fact that Gesenius’ own work on the Phenician
and Punic writing, published in 1835, afforded an
easy mine from which to draw real Phenician
names,

But the other learned men in Germany were of a
more sceptical turn of mind. Dr. Schmidt of Bremen
A GERMAN FORGER 199

told how on one interview with Wagenfeld he was
informed that he could not see the Greek MS,
because it had been sent back to Pereiro, and how
on another occasion he was informed that the MS.
was still in Wagenfeld’s possession but would not be
shown to him. Wagenfeld had also been unable to
give the name of Pereiro’s nephew. Schmidt also
wondered why Sanchoniathon, whom Porphyry had
assigned to Berytus, and Suidas to Tyre, should now
be assigned to Byblos; and why Buddhism, which
only began in the sixth century B.c., should have
been found in Ceylon in the eleventh. And the first
Latin letter from Oporto bore the Bremen postmark,
and was written on paper clearly made at Osnabruck
in Germany.

The younger Grotefend also learnt from a friend
in Portugal that there was no such cloister as the
alleged one, and that the whole of Portugal did not
possess an officer of any sort who could write a letter
in Latin. Pereiro, too, was unknown as a Portuguese
name ; it was always Pereira.

But the extraordinary fact remains that in spite
of all these discoveries, which discredited the work in
the esteem of all who were competent to judge,
Wagenfeld persevered, and in the spring of the
following year (1837) published his Greek version of
Philo Byblius’ supposed translation, with a Latin
translation opposite to every page in Greek. The
full title was: Sanchoniathonis Historiarum Phent-
cie Libros Novem Grace versos a Philo Byblio edidit
200 LITERARY FORGERIES

Latineque versione donavit F. Wagenfeld. Breme
1837, ex officina Carol: Schunemannt.

This courageous work, containing some 205
pages, is for its great curiosity well worth possessing.
K. O. Muller, as soon as it appeared, wrote a most
damaging criticism of its claim to authenticity in the
Gottingische Gelehrte Anzeige (ist April, 1837), but
he admitted that the extreme cleverness of the work
entitled its author to some admiration. It was no
mean task to write nine books of Greek, adapted to
the style of Philo Byblius as deducible from the
extracts from his work given in Eusebius’ Prepara-
tio Evangelica; and, in spite of some mistakes, this
task the author had accomplished with considerable
success. He had also caught the spirit of the ancient
historians, and by a judicious mixture of fable with
his supposed facts given an air of verisimilitude to
the whole which was well calculated to deceive even
the elect in the learned world.

This criticism by Muller virtually settled the
question. Gesenius, who shortly afterwards brought
out his work on the Monuments of the Phentcian
Writing and Language, explained in his preface that
he had never attached more than slender credit to
Wagenfeld’s discovery, and that subsequent criticism,
since he had become possessed of the Greek version,
had shattered his faith in it entirely. The work had
no friend, nor did Grotefend, the elder, again act as
its sponsor by writing a preface.

Muller concluded his article by the expression of
A GERMAN FORGER 201

a good-natured wish that Wagenfeld might in the
future employ the great abilities and learning, of
which he had given such brilliant proofs, in the
service of knowledge more useful to others and more
honourable to himself; but this wish was never ful-
filled. For some years Wagenfeld’s life remained a
literary blank, and the demon of drink is said to
have taken possession of him. In 1845 he published,
however, an interesting collection of the Legends of
Bremen (Bremen’s Volksagen), and in the year fol-
lowing a volume on the Military Expeditions of the
people of Bremen (Kvriegsgefihrten der Bremer).
That same year he died, at the early age of thirty-
six. He is at least entitled to the fame, whatever his
motive may have been, of having attempted one of
the ablest and most daring fabrications in the history
of literature, and of having made his victim for a time
one of the most learned men in the learned world of
Germany. Possibly he had no other motive; pos-
sibly he achieved his aim. And he certainly showed
with what comparative ease the purest fiction may be
dressed in the garb of truth, and romance be substi-
tuted for history.
CHAPTER XII.
A FRENCH FORGER: VRAIN-DENIS LUCAS.

THE prince of forgers, as regards quantity, hails from
France. England may make some boast of her
Chatterton or her Ireland, but it is to compare
pigmies with giants to mention these youths in the
same breath with Vrain-Denis Lucas, born in 1818
at Chateaudun in France, and the son of a peasant.
A very common education was his, but he supple-
mented it by frequenting the library of his native
place in the leisure he could win from his work in a
lawyer’s office. When he left Chateaudun for Paris
in 1852, in his thirty-fourth year, he started with every
prospect and promise of success.

But fortune frowned on him. Failing to obtain
a post in the Imperial Library or with a publisher,
he became associated with the establishment of M.
Letellier, whose function it was to feed the vanity
of certain classes with the provision of pedigrees and
titles, not always of historical value. There appears
to be the same demand for that sort of thing in
France which exists in England. The Marquis de
Du Prat would fain find something to connect him
with Cardinal Du Prat of the sixteenth century for

202
A FRENCH FORGER 203

a contemplated work on the family history ; could
Lucas produce nothing? The temptation was obvi-
ous, and the career of the forger had begun. Lucas
soon produced two letters from Montaigne, one to
Antoine de Du Prat, Provost of Paris, another to
the Marquis de Nantouillet. Of these letters the
Marquis de Du Prat was kind enough to give fac-
similes to M. Feuillet de Conches, one of the chief
collectors of autographs in France and one of the
greatest experts on the subject. In 1854 M. de
Conches published his Causeries un Curteux in
four volumes, wherein he unsuspiciously printed
these letters from Montaigne with judicious remarks
on the light they threw on the history of their time
(iii, 242). It failed to strike him that Montaigne
in one letter wrote aristogratigue for artstocratique ;
and a strange word do/otr he thought must be peri-
gordian or gascon.

If this was Lucas’ first essay, it must have been
vastly encouraging. With such success with one
expert, what might he not hope from others? We
may guess he was not idle between 1854 and 1861,
when he first began his operations on M. Chasles, a
man of world-wide reputation as a geometrician and
astronomer. On M. Chasles between 1861 and
February, 1870, when Lucas was sentenced by the
Correctional Tribunal of Paris to two years’ imprison-
ment and a fine of £25, as many as 27,320 forged
letters were successfully palmed off, at a price to
their dupe of nearly £6,000—one of the most colossal
204 LITERARY FORGERIES

frauds ever perpetrated. The logical incapacity that
M. Chasles displayed throughout the contest sub-
sequently waged over his supposed treasures shows
conclusively how insignificant is the benefit conferred
on the reasoning faculties by mathematical studies.
The leading mathematician of his country showed
himself incapable of reasoning better than a child.
Whenever any doubt was thrown on a particular
letter, he invariably met it by referring to some other
letter of equally doubtful authenticity.

From 1861 to 1869 M. Chasles continued to pur-
chase letters of surpassing scientific and historical
interest from Lucas, and occasionally hundreds at a
time. But how had Lucas come by them? The
story was that a certain Comte de Boisjourdain before
the Revolution had been a great collector of auto-
graph letters ; his collection included some five or
six thousand given to him by Louis XVI., when there
were other things to think about than autographs.
Becoming an émigré to America in 1791, he suffered
shipwreck and perished, but the greater part of his
invaluable collection, after some days’ immersion in
the sea, had been recovered in a fair condition, and
at that time was in the hands of a descendant of
Boisjourdain, an old gentleman, who set a high value
on the letters, and would never part with one of them
before reading it. But he needed money, and there-
fore he had instructed Lucas to dispose of them at a
commission of 25 per cent. Behind this old gentle-
man was another, an old military relative, whose
A FRENCH FORGER 205

consent to such sale had in some measure to be ob-
tained and who showed himself rather averse from
parting with them ; in fact so averse was he, that on
one occasion the heir of all the Boisjourdains ex-
pressed through Lucas a wish to have the letters
back, offering for their return all the money M.
Chasles had paid for them. This offer removed from
M. Chasles’ mind every shadow of a doubt of the
veracity of Lucas, and of course whetted his appetite
for more of his treasures.

There are perhaps few of us who can fairly throw
a stone at M. Chasles for his credulous acceptance of
this amazing story.

In 1867 it became known that M. Chasles pur-
posed to publish a book on the Discovery of the
Laws of Attraction by Pascal, and on 8th July he
promised to lay before the Academy of Sciences, of
which he had been a prominent member since 1851,
the letters on which he based a claim so flattering to
the pride of his countrymen, and so damaging to that
of a neighbouring island which had always claimed
the discovery of the Laws of Gravitation for her Sir
Isaac Newton. A week later he read to his col-
leagues two letters from Pascal to Robert Boyle
which in his opinion proved his case ; for it was not
till 1687 that Newton had made his discovery, and
these letters bore the earlier date of 1652.

Great of course was the excitement, nor was it to
abate for two years, during which it was destined to
distract and divide the world of learning both in
206 LITERARY FORGERIES

France and abroad. Fresh letters came pouring in
week by week and month by month, till, in all, the
Comptes Rendus of the Academy possessed as many
as 381. Nothing would induce M. Chasles to say
from what source he had derived them, and he re-
solutely refused to compare the signature of Pascal
in the new letters with the undoubted signature of
Pascal at the Imperial Library. He sent photo-
graphic copies of some Pascal-Newton letters to Sir
David Brewster, who had written much on Newton,
and who at once pronounced the letters spurious.
There was one from Pascal to Newton when a
scholar at Grantham, aged eleven, in which Pascal
exhorted his young friend to work and study, but
with moderation ; it was only knowledge so acquired
which was profitable. But no proof that it was not
till a much later age that Newton studied scientific
questions at all had any effect upon M. Chasles.

And there were sceptics as wicked as Brewster
in France itself. From the first M. Faugére, cele-
brated for his works on Pascal, proclaimed the letters
to be forgeries, and the same honour belongs to M.
Bénard de Champs of Evreux. This, in M. Chasles’
view, showed a lamentable want of patriotism, and a
disgraceful leaning tothe English enemy. There was
no entente cordiale in those days, and the patriotic
argument influenced even M. Thiers on the side of
the forgeries.

But, despite the sceptics, faith in the genuineness
of the Jetters increased, as they poured in from all
A FRENCH FORGER 207

sorts of persons of distinction. The Academy of
Sciences itself, after a year and a half of trouble and
disputations, gave a kind of official sanction to the
letters on 5th April, 1869. There were letters of
Louis XIV., whose noble simplicity no forger could
have produced ; the style of the letters proved that
they could only have emanated from their professed
authors ; whilst their freedom from such blunders as
no forger could have avoided were a moral proof of
their authenticity. Such arguments have a familiar
ring about them.

M. Chasles and Lucas must have been happy
men when that report came to their knowledge. But
the tide of human happiness is often on the turn
when at its highest, and a week later came forward
M. Breton to show that six precious notes by Pascal
and two fragments of a letter by Galileo had been
taken straight from Saverien’s H/zstotres des Philo-
sophes Modernes (1760-1773).

This was disconcerting, but M. Chasles at once
replied that Saverien had borrowed from the letters,
not the letters from Saverien. This was proved
immediately by letters from Saverien to the Marquise
de Pompadour, returning 200 letters from men of
science like Pascal and Newton and Galileo, and
alluding to the great service they had been to him in
the production of his contemplated work on modern
philosophers.

The versatility displayed by Lucas in thus meet-
ing all critical objections by freshly forged letters
208 LITERARY FORGERIES

was truly marvellous. A famous instance of this
occurred in respect of a letter of Galileo to Pascal,
dated 2nd January, 1641, wherein Galileo wrote:
“T cannot write more, for my eyes are very tired.
I am losing my sight. Do not forget to send me a
description of your arithmetical machine.” And in
all the letters attributed to Galileo in that year was
the same allusion to his failing sight. But there was
abundant evidence that Galileo had been totally
blind by the end of 1637. His own genuine letters
proved it. Here again was a difficulty. But forth-
with other letters were produced from Galileo, to
show either that his blindness was of an intermittent
kind, or that he had exaggerated it in order to pacify
the Inquisition, This question of the blindness of
Galileo provoked great discussion in the world of
letters, but nothing shook M. Chasles’ faith in the
genuineness of the 3,000 letters of Galileo which he
possessed, though the letters were written in French
and Galileo never wrote but in Latin or Italian.

But light was at last to dawn even on Lucas’
victim. On 21st June, 1869, M. Verrier began to read
a Memoir which occupied four sittings of the Aca-
demy, and in which he showed the actual sources from
which Lucas had borrowed the very terms of many
of his letters. Saverien was not the only fountain:
Voltaire had contributed, and Chauffepie’s Dzcteonary
(1750), and Pére Gerdil, and Le Duc de la Valliére,
and Thomas. For instance, in Thomas’ Edoge de
Descartes is the remark that the philosopher would
A FRENCH FORGER 209

have willingly remained unknown if only he could
be useful, and this remark passed verbally into an
alleged letter of Descartes to Queen Christina of
Sweden of 2nd October, 1650. In fact whole pas-
sages so passed into the same letter with scarcely any
alteration.

Discoveries of this sort produced an effect. So
did certain signatures of Galileo sent to Florence to
be compared with the real signature. They were
returned as spurious. Then on 13th September,
1869, even M. Chasles was obliged to bow to the
force of the evidence. But he had some reason for
refusing to believe that one man alone could have
produced such an enormous mass of forged docu-
ments. Yet the experts who examined them found
them all to be undoubtedly in the handwriting of
one man.

Four days after M. Chasles had laid the whole
story before his comrades Lucas was arrested; a
few months later he was sentenced to imprisonment,
and therewith he vanished from the knowledge of
mankind. If he survived his term of two years, he
left prison at the age of fifty-four. Perchance he
lived to a ripe old age, and continued to flood the
world with new forgeries.

There is something almost grotesque in the fact of
a mere forger,a man of no real education, ignorant
alike of Latin and mathematics, not only holding his
own for two years against one of the most learned

societies in the world, but coming within an ace of
14
210 LITERARY FORGERIES

conquering it. A little more and the history of the
world lay at the mercy of his unbridled fancy. On
so frail a tenure rests the kingdom of truth. And it
has to be admitted that there was something grandi-
ose in Lucas’ endeavour. It is hardly possible to do
justice to the industry, the knowledge, the versatility,
the ability, displayed by him. They were almost
superhuman, and it is small wonder that M. Chasles
disbelieved the possibility of forgery on so gigantic
a scale. Lucas would have had to produce four
forged letters on each day of the seventeen years
he had spent in Paris to have completed the number
which he is known to have produced, but as it is
likely his most prolific period was in the eight years
when he had found a market for his wares, it is
probable that the rate of production was consider-
ably higher than four a day. It is the enormous
output of his forgeries which differentiates him from
other workers in the same line.

The mere inventory of the false letters fills
seventeen closely printed pages in MM. Bordier
and Mabille’s Fabrigues des Faux Autographes
(51-68). There were over a thousand letters from
Pascal, including 175 to Sir Isaac Newton, 76 to
Boyle, 33 to Hobbes, and 139 to Galileo. There
were 27 letters from Shakespeare to Larivey ; many
hundreds from Rabelais to various persons; in short
there was no name of distinction in the world’s
history on which some letter or letters did not throw
fresh light and lustre. Nor were the letters con-
A FRENCH FORGER 211

fined to modern times. There were letters of the
Roman emperors, letters from some of the Apostles,
ten letters from Plato, twenty-eight from Pliny, ten
from Seneca, one from Pompey to Cato. Nay, the
letters went farther back still. Thales and Anaxi-
menes and Anaximander contributed some portion of
their correspondence, nor does it appear to have
disconcerted M. Chasles that these most ancient
worthies wrote on paper and in the French language!
There were letters, too, from Lazarus to St. Peter ;
from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus. This was her
letter to the King of the Burgundians :—

“Hail from Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus :
accept my respects, together with this casket. In
it you will find the letter I spoke of to you which
was sent me by Jesus Christ a few days before His
passion. It is accompanied by two sentences which
constitute the basis of the religion of Christ. Take
good care therefore of these precious objects: so
you will be happy and live in peace, which is the
wish,” etc.

Cleopatra thus writes to Caesar :—

“Our son Cesarion is well. I hope he will soon
be able to’ bear the voyage to Marseilles, where I
design to have him educated as much for the good
air of the place as for the fine things they teach. I
beg you therefore to tell me how much longer you
will stay in those countries,” etc.

Possibly M. Chasles did not read all his speci-

mens, but accepted them in blind trust. Their
14 *
212 LITERARY FORGERIES

absurdities and their blunders, alike, seem to have
escaped his notice. There were letters, for instance,
from Strabo to Juvenal, though Strabo was ninety-
two when Juvenal was born. There were letters
from Bede to Alcuin, though Alcuin was only nine
when Bede died. But considering that some
thousand persons figured on Lucas’ canvas, mis-
takes of this sort were marvellously few. In the
381 letters submitted to the Academy and filling
400 pages of its Comptes Rendus the only striking
mistake occurred in a letter signed by the mother of
Newton in her maiden name. But it was only the
flower of the collection that was exhibited to the
Academy, M. Chasles steadily refusing to show
them the whole collection. Out of 3,000 letters of
Galileo they only had 20 to deal with; out of
1,745 of Pascal only 80; out of 622 of Newton
only 29. Had the whole been submitted to them,
the French world of learning would have been
spared some two years of acrimonious wrangling,
and an exceedingly humiliating episode in its history.

Lucas posed as a patriot, and as a patriot he must
be judged. In enriching himself he was studious to
enhance the glory of France. The honour of France
was to be subserved, not only by wresting from
Newton to Pascal the fame of the discovery of the
law of gravitation, but by recovering from the past
all documents which redounded to the credit of Gaul.
It was to its king, Ambigat, that Thales wrote his
advice about government; Alexander the Great
A FRENCH FORGER 213

praised Gaul and its inhabitants in a letter to Aris-
totle ; Lazarus wrote to St. Peter about the Druids
of Gaul; Mary Magdalene wrote to the King of the
Burgundians ; Castor, a Gallic doctor, wrote a letter
to Jesus Christ. One can imagine how all this might
have enriched subsequent histories of France, had
Lucas’ false coin passed into historical currency.

Those must have been delightful years for M.
Chasles in which he amassed these treasures of the
past. The £6,000 he paid for them were a mere
bagatelle for specimens so priceless. Nor was it
only letters which he acquired, for Lucas also sup-
plied him with books of incalculable value : genuine
books, with the signature or a note of some famous
owner forged at the beginning. M. Chasles became
the possessor of 500 books that had once belonged
to La Fontaine, Rabelais, and others. It may be
questioned whether after all M. Chasles did not
derive more pleasure from the acquisition of his
collection than he suffered pain from the ultimate
discovery of its worthlessness,

Lucas appears to have met his exposure with
much real or simulated indifference. Almost to the
eve of his arrest he frequented the public libraries
in the pursuit of his art; and he fought the learned
world gamely to the last. Nor was his line of defence
destitute of humour. He declared his conscience to
be calm; he had injured no one; he had recalled
public attention to facts of history which had been
in danger of being forgotten. Moreover, he had
214 LITERARY FORGERIES

instructed and amused the public for two years during
which it had found pleasure in frequenting the sittings
of the Academy ; M. Chasles, too, had won a hearing
which otherwise would never have been vouchsafed
to him. As for himself, he would always enjoy the
consciousness of having acted, if not with wisdom,
yet at least with uprightness and patriotism.

So true is Dr. Johnson’s dictum that patriotism is
often the last refuge of a scoundrel.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE MARIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES.

THE comparative success of Lucas’ forgeries raises
some uncomfortable reflections about autographs in
general. The taste in France for collecting them
began about 1814, and it has been calculated that
between 1822 and 1835 some 12,000 were sold at
public sales. But from 1836 to 1840 the commerce
in autographs so far increased that as many as 11,000
were sold; between 1841 and 1845 as many as
15,000; between 1846 and 1859 as many as 32,000,
And this was before Lucas had appeared on the
scene.

Whence came this enormous supply? Direct
theft from public libraries undoubtedly would account
for many, but the greater part were the offspring of
forgery. The demand gave rise to the supply.
And as many of these letters would pass from owner
to owner, and throw new and false light on historical
characters, it is not pleasing to think to what a serious
extent history may have come to be falsified by such
means. Had Lucas’ inventions succeeded in obtain-
ing currency, they would have revolutionised history

from Thales to his own time; but what of the inven-
215
216 LITERARY FORGERIES

tions by others that did pass current, and were not
detected ?

It would be impossible to follow all these forged
letters into the chinks they have served to fill in
history. There are probably few historical person-
ages whose characters and actions have not been
falsely coloured by information drawn from these
poisoned wells. But as there is no character which
forgery more completely made its prey than the
unfortunate Queen Marie-Antoinette, it may suffice
from her case alone to draw some conclusions as to
the romances which have arisen in the same way
round the names and memories of others who at the
same time or earlier played their destined parts on
the stage of the world.

Forgery began to gather round Marie-Antoinette
even in her lifetime; primarily of course in the
famous scandal of the Diamond Necklace. This
episode had so close a connexion with the Revolu-
tion that it may almost be doubted whether, but for
the schemings and forgeries of the notorious Madame
la Comtesse de la Motte in the necklace affair, the
Revolution itself might not have been averted or
delayed. In the annals of intrigue is nothing bolder
than this forgery of a Queen’s signature to an order
on a firm of jewellers to the amount of 464,000, and
the concoction of a fictitious amatory correspondence
between the Queen and Prince Louis Cardinal de
Rohan. This correspondence was actually written
by La Motte’s accomplice, Reteaux de Villette, and
THE MARIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES 217

was burnt after the famous trial in May, 1786. But
it would seem that the Cardinal really believed that
the Queen wrote him these letters, and that his own
letters reached the Queen; and it is probable that
La Motte won from him vast sums for her imagined
services as an intermediary. That the Cardinal him-
self was rather dupe than accomplice in the fraud
follows less from his own character or his acquittal
by the Parlement than from the seeming absence of
the pecuniary motive which suffices to account for
the trickery of the others.

After the trial, resulting in La Motte being
whipped, branded and imprisoned, and in Villette
being banished, La Motte joined her husband in
England, and there in 1788 she published her
Mémoires justificatefs, containing thirty-one letters
purporting to have passed between the Queen and
the Cardinal. These she professed to have copied
from the original correspondence which had been
burnt. They revealed the Queen as directing the
Cardinal how to disguise himself, and where to meet
her ; and were couched in terms highly discreditable
to both parties. The Queen’s genuine letters show
the constancy and the intensity of her dislike of the
Cardinal, and the pain which the whole affair caused
her; but her memory had to wait a full century for
its complete clearing, when in 1895 Maxime de la
Rocheterie and the Marquis de Briancourt published
their excellent collection of her genuine letters (e-
ceutl des Lettres Authentiques). But in the mean-
218 LITERARY FORGERIES

time the Queen is reported to have been seen herself
reading a manuscript copy of these terrible Memozrs,
which ran through several editions and were last re-
published in 1846. Forgery in this case touched its
lowest depths.

But many others besides La Motte and Villette
had a hand in composing fictitious letters from the
Queen. Insuch pamphlets as Zhe Queen Unmasked
(La Reine Dévoilée) in 1789, containing some alleged
letters from her, and in the Correspondence of the
Queen with Illustrious Personages (1790) ‘political
animosity was doubtless the inspiring motive. With
letters of this sort she was confronted at her trial.
When a witness declared that in September, 1792, he
had found a letter from the Queen with the words
‘“Can you count on your Swiss? Will they show
up well when the time comes?” the Queen replied,
“T have never written such a letter”. And so with
a letter she was said to have written to Bouillé to
congratulate him on having had seven or eight
thousand persons massacred at Nancy, the reply
was, “I have never written to him”. And then
there was the false Véritable lettre addressed to the
Convention, to the Departments of France and to
foreign Powers, in which she denied the accusation
of conspiring against the French people; charged
them with having changed from a docile to a san-
guinary people; reminded them of her charity to
the poor; and expressed her desire for a reconcilia-
tion. There can be little doubt that forgery was
THE MARIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES 219

a weapon which had a large share in her tragic
fate.

But the intriguing La Motte perished before her
victim. On the bailiffs entering her residence in
London, she jumped out of window, but sustained
such injuries that it took her several months to re-
cover from them. When she had recovered, she
died of a surfeit of mulberries (1791). Over the fate
of Villette history maintains the silence of indifference.

But the production of forged letters was far from
ceasing with the Queen’s life. Three false letters
of the Queen to the Princesse de Lamballe were
printed (1801) in Madame Guénard’s Mémoires
Fiistoriques, relating to that lady (ili., 222; iv., 138;
iv., 167), and two in Lafond d’Aussonne’s MWémozres
secrets... de la Reine de France (89, 151), in
1824.

So the game of fabrication continued, the forg-
ing of letters keeping pace with the zeal of collectors.
One is astonished to find Lucas not selling to M.
Chasles more than seventeen letters of Marie-An-
toinette ; but there were other workers in the field
besides Lucas, and other dupes besides M. Chasles.
A proud man was the Count Paul Vogt d’Hunolstein
when in 1864 he brought out, as the result of long
autograph-hunting, such a work as the Correspondance
inédite de Marie-Antoinette, publide sur les documents
originaux, There were 132 letters in all, covering
a period of twenty-three years, from the year of the
Queen’s marriage in 1770 to the year preceding her
220 LITERARY FORGERIES

death, 1792. The collector proceeded to give a
sketch of the Queen’s life and character, founded on
this “instructive and touching correspondence,” in
which figured letters from the Queen to her mother
Maria Theresa, to her brother Joseph II., to her
sister Maria-Christina, and to several others. He
was sure that writers more capable than himself
would use these documents, which he had won for
history, as precious materials for a new study of the
Revolution.

History had rather a narrow escape from so
unfortunate a fate. For the Count’s book at once
became popular, and was quickly followed by a second
and third edition, incorporating nineteen fresh auto-
graph letters of the Queen. But it so chanced
that M. Feuillet de Conches, who had also been
collecting autographs for twenty years and had con-
sulted the archives of France, Austria, Russia and
Sweden, brought out in the same year his work on
the unpublished letters and documents of Louis XVI.,
Marie-Antoinette, and Mme. Elizabeth, and therein
were twenty-four of the same letters that the Count
had published, with certain slight differences in the
text! Criticism was naturally roused ; the usual con-
troversy ensued ; and attack and defence continued
for more than two years.

In the course of this controversy M. d’Arneth
published at Vienna from the private archives of the
Imperial family the letters that had undoubtedly
passed between the Queen and her mother between
THE MARIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES 221

1770 and 1780, and this supplied a standard of
measurement for the questionable letters published
by the two collectors of autographs. Facsimiles of
the Queen’s real signature showed marked differ-
ences from the doubtful signature. The forger,
knowing only the Queen’s signature of her later years,
had provided all his works with a uniform signature,
unaware of the modifications which the Queen’s
handwriting had assumed with time. Moreover
there were historical and other contradictions with
the Viennese letters. In short only two letters came
unscathed out of the fire of criticism: one from the
Queen to her mother dated 14th June, 1777, and one
to Maria-Christina, dated 29th May, 1790, and both
these were in the collection of M. Feuillet de
Conches.

Nevertheless, in spite of criticism, the Count
d’Hunolstein, in a long preface to the fourth edition
of his collection, published in 1868, persevered in
believing in the authenticity of his letters. To sucha
belief he had every reason to cling as long as possible.
He had acquired all of his autographs, as M. Feuillet
de Conches had acquired most of his, at public sales
or by private purchase. M. Jacques Charavay, an
expert and dealer in autographs, whose good faith in
the matter was never doubted, had had dealings with
both collectors ; and the Count had abundant reason
for thinking it strange that M. Charavay should never
have shown to M. Feuillet de Conches, through all
their years of dealing, any of the letters he had sold to
222 LITERARY FORGERIES

himself! And the Count’s collection was believed to
have stood him in a sum of 43,400! And who can
guess the sums paid by M. Feuillet de Conches, one
of the greatest collectors and experts in the world ?
Some tribute is due to the skill of the unknown
forger of these letters. If they did not constitute
history, they followed historical lines, and were
founded on such historical works as the MWémotres de
J. L. Soulavie and of Mme. de Campan. They bore
a considerable likeness to the real letters of the Queen,
full of amiable sentiment and of concern for the health
of others and of herself. But the genuine letters con-
victed the writer of occasional mistakes, as where the
Queen is made to tell her sister that the ‘‘ King, always
a slave to forms,” had wished to submit to the Parle-
ment the punishment of the Cardinal, after the
necklace affair, whereas the Queen’s genuine letter
to Joseph II., dated 19th September, 1785, says ex-
pressly that “the King had the kindness to give the
Cardinal his choice between being judged by the
Parlement, or of admitting his crime and of submit-
ting himself to his clemency. He preferred the
former course, and it is said regrets it” (cf
D’Hunolstein, 141, and Rocheterie’s Le¢zves, ii., 78).
But if Count d’ Hunolstein’s collection failed to
give a false colour to history, the same cannot be
said of other letters of the Queen collected by other
collectors, and more especially by M. Feuillet de
Conches. In the course of the nineteenth century
twenty-nine letters of the Queen to the Duchesse de
THE MARIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES 223

Polignac came into circulation, most of which were
published by De Conches, and eight of which belonged
to him. These eight he seems to have obtained from
a grocer, who had picked them up from the street
when thrown out of a window of the royal stable, of
which a Polignac was governor, by a victorious
crowd in 1848! But some of De Conches’ letters
were in the collections of others, and it was found
that whole passages had been extracted from genuine
letters from the Queen to the Duchess, published by
J. B. Gail in his Lettves inédites in 1828. Another
source was the publication in 1796 by the Comtesse
Diane de Polignac of the Memoirs of the Duchess,
which contained extracts from the Queen’s corres-
pondence with her. These letters, belonging to the
Polignac family, and copied by Gail, nine in all, are
the only letters that can be accepted with any con-
fidence as genuine, and all the history that has been
built on the other twenty is so much waste-paper.

It is an extraordinary fact that so great an auto-
graphist as M. Feuillet de Conches should have
failed to detect the numerous verbal identities between
many of his letters and those which in 1828 had been
published by Gail (Rocheterie’s Lettres, Introd.,
xli.). He often lent some precious gems of his
collection to friends who were occupied with historical
works. He lent a Polignac letter to Beauchesne, in
whose book on Louis XVII. it duly appeared in fac-
simile (i, 158), and he lent Lescure a number of
letters from the Queen to the Princesse de Lamballe,
224 LITERARY FORGERIES

nor did the author of the life of that unfortunate
Princess use any other letters for his work but those
supplied him by De Conches. One of these, which
De Conches accounted among the most precious in
his collection, belonged to the three which by a late
legend fell out of her hair at the moment of her
assassination, and was stained with blood. But this
and forty other letters to the Princesse de Lamballe
are unauthentic, and render valueless all the histories
of which they form a part. To this category, in so
far as they are based on the Queen’s letters, belong
both Lescure’s La Vrate Marie-Antotnette and his
Princesse de Lambatle.

And in addition to these letters were a number
of others to different persons, which also came to
circulate amongst collectors and to pass from cabinet
to cabinet at public sales, at high prices. It would
be impossible to follow all these letters into the
crannies they may have come to occupy in history.
But the really genuine letters collected by Rocheterie
and the Marquis de Beaucourt amount to 396, and
these may be regarded as amply sufficing for the
needs of history.

When M. Geffroy was allowed to inspect the
Count’s letters of the Queen to her mother and
sisters, it was at once apparent that there was not
the least similitude of writing between these letters
and the real ones; and it was admitted that M. de
Conches’ letters were of a third variety of writing.
It was not a question of slight differences, difficult
THE MARIE-ANTOINETTE FORGERIES 225

to detect, and requiring the practised eye of an
expert; it was a question “of a total difference”
(Gustave IIT, et la Cour de France, ii., 328). But
what an abyss this opens up! For here were men who
made autographs their special hobby, who paid long
pricés for them, and who dealt with the most expert
agents ; yet purchasers and dealers were alike de-
ceived by the superior skill of the professional forger.
The only sane conclusion is to look with the gravest
distrust on any letter purporting to be the Queen’s
in any private collection, especially if such letter is
signed, for her more intimate letters were rarely
signed ; and in short to extend the same distrust to
any letter purporting to be her husband’s or that of
any other historical character belonging to that time.

It may be thought that the triumph of the forger
is apt to be transitory, and that truth will always
emerge at last. But for this idea there is no founda-
tion. Criticism with infinite trouble may succeed in
exposing the falsity of certain letters, and of correct-
ing the errors they have imported into history ; but
how can it deal with the enormous mass of such
productions, or hope to drive from their historical
position many a letter that has wrongfully crept into
the confidence of mankind?

15
CHAPTER XIV.
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND.

Never in England has there been such a rush for
places at a theatre as there was on Saturday, 2nd
April, 1796, for places at Drury Lane. For it was
the night when Sheridan was to present to the
British public the famous play of “ Vortigern and
Rowena,” the alleged recently discovered play of
Shakespeare. Although Harris, of Covent Garden,
had also offered liberal terms for the play, the com-
petition had resulted in favour of Sheridan of Drury
Lane, who agreed to pay the bookseller, Samuel
Ireland, the possessor of the play, £300 down and
half profits for the first sixty performances.

All the world has long since known that this
wondrous play was in reality the sole composition of
Ireland’s son, William Henry, then a youth of barely
eighteen years of age, who, at the time he first told
his father of his find of a play of Shakespeare among
the old papers belonging to the unknown gentleman
“Mr. H.,” had not only never attempted poetical
composition of any sort, but had not even written a
line of his marvellous composition.

Did Sheridan believe in its genuineness when he
226
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 227

put it on the stage? When he went to the book-
seller’s shop in Norfolk Street to inspect the fair copy,
which had been transcribed from the MS. in the dis-
guised Shakespearian handwriting, he came across
a line which caused him to exclaim to Mr. Ireland :
“This is rather strange, for though you are ac-
quainted with my opinion as to Shakespeare, yet, be
it as it may, he certainly always wrote poetry ”.
Further on he commented as follows: ‘‘ There are
certainly some bold ideas, but they are crude and
undigested. It is very odd; one would be led to
think that Shakespeare must have been very young
when he wrote the play. As to the doubting
whether it be really his or not, who can possibly
look at the papers, and not believe them ancient ? ”
Yet Malone, the eminent critic, had convinced
Kemble, the actor, that the play was spurious, and
in his Zuguzry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscel-
laneous Papers, published within a few days of the
first and last performance of ‘‘ Vortigern,” accounted
quite correctly for the antiquity of the actual paper,
which is said to have made such an impression on
Sheridan: ‘The true and natural paper-warehouse
for such a schemer to repair to is the shop of a book-
seller, where every folio and quarto of the age of
Elizabeth and James would supply a couple of single
leaves of white-brown paper, of the hue required”
(311). As Malone had been from the first an active
disbeliever in all the Shakespearian forgeries of which

“Vortigern” was only the last, Sheridan can hardly
15 *
228 LITERARY FORGERIES

have been really deceived by the antiquity of the
paper, and Kemble’s story goes to indicate that he
was more deceiving than deceived. Kemble, despite
his own scepticism, consented to act in the play, in
deference to Sheridan’s request, who “thought it
would be good for the treasury”! ‘‘ You know very
well,” he said to Kemble, “that an Englishman con-
siders himself as good a judge of Shakespeare as of
his pint of porter” (Cluds of London, ii, 107).

And how did the Englishman judge his Shake-
speare? Did he agree with the critics who declared
that ‘“Vortigern,” though inferior to Shakespeare’s
best plays, was superior to his worst? There are
several accounts of the momentous night, but though
they differ considerably in detail they all agree that the
play was most irretrievably and conclusively damned.

According to the Zzmes of the following Monday
the first Act was fairly heard, though every line of
it “spoke itself an actual forgery”. The second
and third Acts proved less tolerable, whilst the
fourth elicited “rude murmurs” and “continual mer-
riment,” whilst in the fifth Act the speech on Death,
‘‘on which the great hope of the authenticity ” of the
play rested, drew down bursts of laughter, which
reached its culmination when Kemble delivered the
words—

“TI would this solemn mockery were o’er”’.

This account agrees in the main with that given
by young Ireland in his Confessions (1805). But a
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 229

very different account is attributed to Kemble by
the author (possibly William Marsh, M.P.) of Zhe
Clubs of London (ii., 107).

According to Kemble, the first Act, much of the
second, and a few speeches in the third were ‘“‘en-
dured”, There were occasional deep growls of dis-
approbation, but they were silenced for a time by
Humphry Sturt, who roared out from the stage box
‘‘with the intonation of a bull” to “give the thing a
fair trial”. When Kemble reached the fatal line,
‘the most overwhelming sounds of mingled groans
and laughter ran through the house,” though for a
few moments the brazen voice of Sturt again secured
silence. But when Phillimore called out to the
soldiers who were carrying off Rowena, “ Give her
up, give her up, oh, give her up,” the same Humphry
“threw himself back on the bench and burst into a
fit of horse-laughing as deafening as the falls of
Niagara, and the rest of the audience caught the in-
fection. ‘Give her up, give her up,’ resounded from
a thousand tongues. The hint was taken and the
curtain fell.”

But the words do not occur in the extant editions
of “ Vortigern”. Kemble himself played the part of
Vortigern, and must as Vortigern have spoken the
line about the solemn mockery ; yet in this interview
he is made to say that it was as Vortigern that
Phillimore called out to the soldiers to give up
Rowena. But Phillimore’s name is attached to the
part of Horsus in the playbill, and Ireland says that
230 LITERARY FORGERIES

it was the dying of Phillimore as Horsus in fight
with Pascentius in the fourth scene of the fourth Act
that gave a “deadly blow” to his play. For Philli-
more managed to fall with the drop-curtain across
his body, his feet facing the audience, and there he
lay groaning under its weight for some moments till,
though dead, he extricated himself, to the great
amusement of the spectators. Phillimore was famous
for the size of his nose, and Ireland, the elder, never
forgave him for his acting on this occasion; the
length of his nose, he said, was ‘‘enough to damn
the finest play Shakespeare ever wrote ”.

Nor did he forgive Kemble, who, when he came
to the already quoted line, uttered it “in the most
sepulchral tone of voice possible,” whereupon “the
most discordant howl echoed froin the pit that ever
assailed the organs of hearing, and continued for ten
minutes,” when Kemble, “in order to amuse the
audience still more, redelivered the very line above
quoted with even more solemn grimace than he had
in the first instance displayed ”.

So says young Ireland in his Confesszons, pub-
lished in 1805, and his account was corroborated by
an eye-witness who as “ Octogenarian” gave his re-
collections of the event sixty-one years later in Votes
and Queries (20th June, 1857). But Octogenarian’s
memory was given in correction of that of another
eye-witness who had said in the number for 6th June
of the same periodical that when Kemble came to
the words, “Then catch him by the throat,” he
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 231

grasped his throat “with a rather ludicrous action”
and paused, when “a slight laugh arose, and he
himself appeared to be struggling with convulsive
laughter, and then burst out a roar of genuine mirth
from the pit, which was taken up by the whole house.
From that moment the condemnation was complete,
and the termination was accompanied by the same
roars of laughter as attend the broadest farce ever
exhibited upon the English stage.” But the recited
words are not in the existing versions of the play,
where the allusion is to the feet, not the throat; so
that the only conclusion can be that the writer had
slightly forgotten the facts, though as to the actual
fate of the play all writers are agreed.

One can imagine meantime the misery of poor
Samuel Ireland, the father, a firm believer in the
genuineness of the play fabricated by his son, as he
sat with his friends in a central box, and watched the
impression it produced. He would have nothing to
do with the prologue written by Pye, the poet-
laureate ; he required the stronger committal vouch-
safed by Sir James Burgess, who prefaced the play
with a prologue which concluded as follows :—

From deep oblivion snatched, this play appears :

It claims respect, since Shakespeare’s name it bears ;
That name, the source of wonder and delight,

To a fair hearing has at least a right.

We ask no more—with you the judgment lies ;

No forgeries escape your piercing eyes !

Unbiass’d then pronounce your dread decree,

Alike from prejudice and favour free.
232 LITERARY FORGERIES

If, the fierce ordeal pass’d, yOu chance to find

Rich sterling ore, tho’ rude and unrefined,

Stamp it your own; assert your poet’s fame,

And add fresh wreaths to Shakespeare’s honoured name.

And what of the feelings of the son, the juvenile
author of all this commotion? No wonder he soon
left the paternal box, and disappeared behind the
scenes, where at the beginning of the third Act Mrs.
Jordan congratulated him on its probable success.
And one can almost believe him when he says that
after it was all over he “retired to bed, more easy
in mind than he had been for a great length of time,
as the load was removed which had oppressed him”.
That night he slept ‘‘ most profoundly ”—as befits the
happy age of eighteen.

The magnificence of the hoax, its extreme clever-
ness, its close approximation to success, might have
entitled the youthful culprit to more lenient treat-
ment than he received.

He was driven from the solicitor’s office in New
Inn where all his forgeries had been concocted, and
the home in Norfolk Street knew him no more. The
moralist may decree that justice was meted out to
him, but what casuist shall fairly apportion their
proper shares of blame between the youth who
forged the play, the proprietor who accepted it de-
spite abundant reasons for believing it to be forged,
and the great manager-actor who firmly believing it
to be forged played his part with the apparent design
of ruining its success as a play?
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 233

But if this charge can fairly be laid against
Kemble, at least posterity owes him some gratitude.
For what if the play had succeeded, as Ireland
always thought it might have done, had it only been
acted at Covent Garden, whither the King and Court
were wont to resort? All chance of success was
averted by Kemble’s acting, and by Malone’s famous
Inquiry. This work had been published, accord-
ing to the Zzmes, shortly before the eventful night,
and the purport of it was conveyed to the public by
handbills freely distributed on the day of the re-
presentation. The 7zmes, like Ireland, the father,
blamed Malone for striking just at the critical
moment; “ We cannot help observing,” it said, with
its familiar unctuous rectitude, “that Mr. Malone’s
publication against the authenticity of the play only
two days before it was to be represented was a very
unfair proceeding and extremely illiberal”. Yet
Malone had only had three months in which to
complete a work of over 400 pages, and what could
he do better than denounce a forgery at the very
moment when it was possible it might befool the
public?

Had the result been otherwise, young Ireland
was ready to flood the world with other plays of
Shakespeare.

In ten weeks he wrote the play of “ Henry II.,”
which he gave in his own handwriting to his father,
from the supposed original MS., which he intended
to produce on old paper in the disguised handwrit-
234 LITERARY FORGERIES

ing, had not the failure of “ Vortigern” led to the
confession of the whole story. ‘Henry II.,” a de-
cided improvement on “ Vortigern,” was in its turn to
have been followed by a series of plays covering all
the reigns between William I. and Elizabeth, and
all were to have been attributed to Shakespeare!
And the father enumerated a long list of portions
of plays and other writings of Shakespeare, including
a brief autobiography, which this promising lad swore
that he had seen and doubtless would have produced.
To what confusion might not all this have led but
for Kemble and Malone, and to what disquieting
reflections does it not give rise touching the com-
parative facility of forgery ?

The only person connected with “ Vortigern” who
came morally well out of it was Samuel Ireland, the
father, though it was not till long after his death
in 1800 that his memory was finally cleared of
complicity in the fraud.

In 1876 his literary remains were bought from
his nephew by the British Museum, and they placed
his innocence beyond all doubt. In November, 1796,
he published his Vixdtcatcon, explaining his conduct
in the matter. It is clear from the preface that,
though the main facts were then admitted, he still
doubted whether the Shakespearian relics were really
spurious or genuine. He disbelieved all his son’s
confessions, from sheer inability, so natural in a father,
to credit him with the capacity to produce such works.
His son’s declarations about the source of the papers
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 235

had been made to him “in the most solemn and
awful manner before crowds of the most eminent char-
acters” who came to his house, and he could not
therefore have cherished the slightest suspicion of
his veracity. His story, too, had been corroborated
in the most solemn manner by his son’s friend and
confidant, Montague Talbot, in several letters ; the
Vindication in short bore all the marks of plausi-
bility and truth.

But it failed to carry conviction. The a priord
improbability of a mere youth accomplishing such a
fraud deprived it of credit. Ritson, the antiquary,
in a letter about it to Laing, the bookseller, wrote :
‘All the plays, deeds, letters and papers of every
description which have been produced by Ireland
owe their existence solely to his son Samuel, alias
William Henry, a boy of nineteen, in whom no
talents of any kind were ever before discovered
even by the father himself, who has in fact been
the completest of all possible dupes to the astonish-
ing artifices of this second Chatterton” (1st Dec.,
1796, Nichol’s Zt. //Z, iii., 779).

But others were not so believing as Ritson.
The famous George Steevens in a letter to Bishop
Percy, dated 26th December, 1796, declared that the
Vindication exhibited “fresh indications of forgery ”.
As to the son’s Authentic Account of the Shake-
spearian Manuscripts, in which he had done his best
to exonerate his father from all guilt in the matter,
that was merely ‘‘a new game of fraud,” and “ pro-
236 LITERARY FORGERIES

duced with the sole view of whitewashing the senior
culprit” ; the quarrel between father and son was
only simulated (Nichol’s Z7¢. 722., vii., 9).

This was the story that despite young Ireland’s
Confesstons, published in 1805, prevailed for about
eighty years. Dr. Ingleby, writing in 1859, declared
that the father “was the general who devised and
methodised the strategy, and executed the simulated
handwriting ; W. H. Ireland’s duty was merely that
of amanuensis and copier for his excellent parent.
. . . The house of the Irelands was in fact a manu-
factory of forgeries, done for the sole object of
making money” (Shakespearian Fabrications, 100).
And Mr. Fitzgerald, in his book on the Kembles,
in 1871, wrote of the ‘‘ bold imposture of ‘ Vortigern’
put forward by the /ve/ands” (i., 338). But this view
was entirely erroneous, as Dr. Ingleby himself
candidly admitted in his “Literary Career of a
Shakespeare Forger,’ appended to his work on
Shakespeare published in 1877, after he had in-
spected the papers of Samuel Ireland, then recently
acquired by the British Museum: ‘“ My own ex-
amination of these voluminous papers has removed
from my mind all doubt as to the complete exculpation
of the old man”.

But it remains hard on the old man that he
should have died under the suspicion of forgery,
and perhaps by reason of it, and then had to wait
all those years for his memory to be cleared of the
aspersions of critics who had no justifiable data for
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 237

their judgment. Time in this case has amply
verified the vain efforts made by the son to excul-
pate his father, and the general credibility of his
Confesstons has been undoubtedly enhanced by their
proved veracity on this single point. The worst
that can be said against the father is that he was
too enthusiastic about Shakespeare : he talked about
him daily, and read his works constantly in the family
circle, doubtless to that circle’s weariness. But dearly
did he pay for it, for it rendered him the natural and
easy prey of imposition, and one can almost believe
the statement of William Henry that it was to please
rather than to deceive his parent, that he executed
his first forgery, the autograph of Shakespeare ap-
pended to the supposed lease from himself and
Heminge to Michael Fraser and his wife.

The success of this attempt led to the concoction
of all those other forgeries which made the year 1795
so memorable in literary annals. It would be tedious
to dwell in detail on all the legal documents, re-
ceipts and so forth signed by Shakespeare, which in
rapid succession issued from the office in New Inn.
They can still be studied in the Mrscellaneous
Papers and Legal Instruments under the hand and
seal of Wilham Shakespeare, published by Samuel
Ireland, their proud possessor, in 1796.

This publication the son naturally opposed as
long as he could. So long as they could only be
seen in Norfolk Street, there was hope of escape
from detection, but, once let them be printed, they
238 LITERARY FORGERIES

would lie at the mercy of Malone. And it was little
mercy Malone showed them after they were published.
His Jxguiry, published the following April, may
have been of needless length, but it was a triumphant
piece of criticism, and it was at once and for ever
fatal. Many of the words in the MSS. were not in
use in the sixteenth century, and the weird spelling
belonged to no known age of English letters.

And in justification of the length of Malone’s
criticism it must be remenibered that a belief in the
papers had begun to take no small hold of public
opinion.

Samuel Ireland’s own too simple faith infected
others, who came in crowds to see the precious relics
at Norfolk Street. It is true that Ritson came, and
after a few pointed questions went away without a
word, leaving no doubt as to his real verdict, and
that Porson, when asked to attest his belief in the
papers, said that he made a point of never subscrib-
ing to confessions of faith; but many men of no
mean fame readily signed what Steevens afterwards
called “that register of shame,” the elder Ireland’s
lists of believers in the papers, Of these the first
was signed on 25th February, 1795, and the second
in March of the following year, when “ Vortigern,”
“ Lear,” and the deed in favour of Ireland had been
added to the earlier collection. The idea of sucha
testimonial seems to have originated with Boswell,
who saw them within a few months of his death
(19th May, 1795). He examined first the docu-
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 239

ments themselves, and then their language in the
fair copies that had been made from the disguised
handwritings. His labours compelled him to call
for a tumbler of warm brandy and water. After
that he redoubled his praises of the MSS., and de-
clared that he should now die happy, having lived
to see such a day. Finally he knelt before the
volume and exclaimed: “I now kiss the invaluable
relics of our bard, and thanks to God that I have
lived to see them”. Such is young Ireland’s story,
which is confirmed by that given by his father in
his Vzxdicatzon. It must be set on the credit side
of these absurd forgeries that they thus helped to
cheer the last days of the amiable and eminent
biographer.

The learned Dr. Parr was in favour of a stronger
testimonial than that suggested by Boswell, and it
was finally couched in the following terms :—

‘“We, whose names are hereunto subscribed,
have in the presence of and by favour of Mr. Ireland
inspected the Shakespeare papers, and are convinced
of their authenticity”. Among the twenty-one names
are those of Parr himself, of Boswell, of Pinkerton,
of three peers (Somerset, Lauderdale and Kinnaird),
and of Pye, the poet-laureate. Some of the names
on this first list are the same which appear on the list
of a year later, but several are different. By that
time faith in “ Lear” and “ Vortigern” required to be
added to faith in the previous discoveries, and in the
interval perhaps doubts had arisen. The father
240 LITERARY FORGERIES

deemed the supposed find of the original of ‘“‘ Lear” a
‘national discovery,” and accepted as improvements
all the alterations of the text which his son had
made in his new original edition. He regretted that
only a portion of the original of ‘‘ Hamlet” had been
discovered. But would he, as a supposed party to
the fraud, have informed his readers of so suspicious
a fact as that on the paper of the“ Lear” MS. more
than twenty different water-marks were discernible?

Among the earlier forgeries was Shakespeare’s
“Profession of Faith,” which young Ireland says that
he wrote off just as the thoughts arose in his mind
‘‘without any previous transcript or subsequent
alteration”. When the secret came out, it seemed
absurd enough that Shakespeare should have con-
cluded his long effusion with such words as these
(in modern spelling) :—

‘“O cherish us like the sweet chicken that under
the cover of her spreading wings receives her little
brood and hovering over them keeps them harmless
and in safety”.

But at the time this “ Profession” was much ad-
mired. When the father read it out to Dr. Parr and
Dr. Joseph Wharton, one of them, probably the latter,
exclaimed : ‘‘ Sir, we have very fine passages in our
Church Service, and our litany abounds with beauties,
but here, Sir, is a man who has distanced us all”.
Yet Dr. J. Wharton’s name is absent from the list
of the believers. But it was the encouragement thus
given by his fatal praise which tempted Ireland to
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 241

further efforts, the “‘ Profession ” being the first forgery
in which he had ventured beyond the simple auto-
graph of Shakespeare’s name.

Mr. F. Webb, who signed both the testimonials
and who was a man of letters and learning, was so
convinced of the genuineness of the forgeries that
under the title of ‘“ Philalethes” he published a pam-
phlet in their defence. Hewrote: “I am fully satis-
fied and believe that no human wisdom, cunning, art,
or deceit, if they could be united, are equal to the task
of such an imposture”. Again: “ What man or set
of men who had sat down with an intention to deceive
the world by palming upon it forgeries of plays in
the name of Shakespeare could possibly have deemed
it necessary to the support of such a design to have
fabricated such writings and forged such legal instru-
ments as those which now exist?” <A perfectly fair
and unanswerable argument, and often urged on
behalf of other works than Ireland’s ; and yet how
perfectly wrong! Of Shakespeare’s addresses to Ann
Hathaway he writes: ‘“ Nature and Nature alone
produces documents like these. They are marked
with the authentic seal of her artless simplicity.
These are fine touches, which imposture can never
imitate.”

And these are the verses :—

Is there in heaven aught more rare
Than thou sweet nymph of Avon fair
Is there on earth a man more true

Than Willy Shakespeare is to you
16
242 LITERARY FORGERIES

Though fickle fortune prove unkind
Still doth she leave her wealth behind
She ne’er the heart can form anew
Nor make thy Willy’s love untrue

Though age with withered hand do strike
The form most fair the face most bright
Still doth she leave untouched and true
Thy Willy’s love and friendship too

Though death with never failing blow
Doth man and babe alike bring low
Yet doth he take naught but his due
And strikes not Willy’s heart still true

Since then nor fortune death nor age
Can faithful Willy’s love assuage
Then do J live and die for you

Thy Willy sincere and most true.

The other sample of Nature’s work ran as
follows :—

“ Dearest ANNA,

“As thou hast always found me to my
word most true so thou shalt see I have strictly kept
my promise I pray you perfume this my little lock
with thy balmy eyes so then indeed shall kings them-
selves bow and pay homage to it I do assure thee no
rude hand hath knotted it thy Willie’s alone hath
done the work. Neither the gilded bauble that
environs the head of Majesty no nor honours most
weighty would give me half the joy as did this my
little work for thee. The feeling that did nearest
approach unto it was that which cometh nighest unto
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 243

God meek and gentle charity for that virtue o Anna
do I love thee do I cherish thee into my heart for
thou art as a tall cedar stretching forth its branches
and succouring smaller plants from nipping winter or
the boisterous winds. Farewell tomorrow by times
I will see thee till then Adieu sweet love.
“ Thine ever,
“Wm. SHAKESPEARE.”

The feelings of Webb, Chalmers, and other
believers, when the fraud was confessed, can better
be imagined than described. But however impos-
sible they found it to forgive the author of all their
deception, for posterity it has its amusing side. No
better farce has ever been enacted on the stage of
real life. For these compositions must have been
pored over and pronounced genuine by all who signed
the first testimonial. They caused Boswell to burst
into a kind of Mune dimittzs, and were perhaps ad-
mired as inimitable productions by Pye, the poet-
laureate, of whom Sir Walter Scott so cruelly said
that in everything but his poetry he was eminently
respectable.

The faith of the elder Ireland was, therefore, only
coincident with that of more competent judges than
himself. His credulity was no more reprehensible
than theirs. What more could he have done to test
the value of the documents than he did by the
publicity he gave them? He not only courted the

criticism of the learned, but facilitated their inquiries
16 *
244 LITERARY FORGERIES

by having the illegible originals transcribed into
modern handwriting. And then he published them
for the inspection of the whole world. There had
been, as he truly said in the preface to this publica-
tion of the M€escellanecous Papers, ‘no disinterested
individual, in the circle of literature, to whose critical
eye he had not been earnest that the whole should be
subjected. He had courted, he had even challenged,
the critical judgment of those who were best skilled
in the poetry and phraseology in which Shakespeare
lived : as well as those, whose profession or course of
study had made them conversant with ancient deeds,
writings, seals and autographs.” The paper-maker
as well as the professional author had been taken
into counsel. He argued fairly that it was impossible,
amidst so many various sources of detection, for a
forger to have escaped detection. As to the charge
against himself of imposing on the public, “no con-
sideration” would have tempted him to such a fraud ;
“had even the possibility of forging these papers
been in his estimation within the reach of art, they
should never have met the public eye”. No wonder
that, when at last the letter came from his son, a boy
of eighteen, confessing his fraud, the father received
it with frank disbelief. Not only no single man, but
no set of men, could, he argued, have produced the
mass of evidence then in his possession; he still
believed they were Shakespeare’s; the idea of their
being his son’s work was quite inadmissible.

One almost wonders how his reason survived the
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 245

ultimate acceptance of the truth. For nearly two
years the poor bookseller had been one of the most
famous men in England; the highest and most
learned in the land had visited him in Norfolk Street ;
the Prince of Wales himself had carefully scrutinised
the relics. Think of all those to whom, as to the
prince, he had read that wondrous passage about
the ‘sweet chicken”; think of those to whom he
had shown with pride in its gilt casket that most
precious relic of Shakespeare’s hair, or of those to
whom rings had been given with small cuttings from
these precious locks. Think of the contemplated
new Life of Shakespeare, destined to throw a new
light upon his character ; the book from Shakespeare’s
library, with the poet’s own annotations, displaying
‘“‘a disposition amiable and gentle as his genius was
transcendent” ; the “Profession of Faith,” proving
the poet to have been a Protestant; the letter to
Cowley, the actor, with its ‘‘ witty conundrum,” prov-
ing him to have been so good-natured and playful.
Think of all these dreams dispelled, this burst of
glory over, and the whole thing admitted to have
been a sordid and heartless forgery practised upon
him by his own son, a mere lad of eighteen! The
limits of a father’s forgiveness should not be strait-
ened, but the strain on Samuel Ireland’s powers
was unusually severe, nor can we be surprised that
he failed under it.

Neither at home, therefore, nor in the world was
any forgiveness possible for so stupendous a hoax,
246 LITERARY FORGERIES

Young Ireland survived his confession some forty
years, dying finally in 1835. In 1832 he reprinted
“Vortigern” with an account of its history. And he
produced certain novels to which his earlier history
lends a kind of interest.

But he fell short of the early promise which he
gave under the borrowed plumes of Shakespeare.
For when all is said, both ‘“ Vortigern” and ‘‘ Henry
IJ.” remain extraordinary literary feats for a boy to
have accomplished. It would seem that the mere
effort of writing after an assumed model acts as a
kind of hypnotic self-suggestion, and renders the in-
tellect capable of otherwise impossible performance.
For neither of these plays could or would have
been written but for the hope and prospect, which
gradually unfolded itself, of palming them off on the
world as the works of Shakespeare.

Ireland admits the influence which the story of
Chatterton exercised on his own career. He used
frequently, he says, to envy his fate, and desire
nothing so ardently as the termination of his own
existence in a similar cause. Allowance must be
made for the period in which his life was cast ; for it
was a kind of golden age of forgery. He himself
paid the full penalty of his offence, but others of his
contemporaries, without the excuse of youth, seem
to have suffered little loss of reputation for their
detected and admitted deceptions.

What are we to say, for instance, of George
Steevens, the eminent critic of Shakespeare and the
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 247

malevolent enemy of the elder Ireland, whom Dis-
raeli described as ‘‘a creature so spotted over with
literary forgeries and adulterations that any remark-
able one about the time he flourished may be attri-
buted to him”? He it was who originated the story
of the upas-tree of Java; who deceived Gough, the
antiquarian, by a fabricated stone inscribed with the
name of Hardiknute ; and who forged an account in
the Theatrical Mirror of a “merry meeting at the
Globe” between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and
Ned Alleyne, in a letter purporting to have been
written by George Peele, the actor, and dated 1600,
two years after that actor is known to have been
dead, though there is no certain knowledge of the
actual date of his death (Curzoseties of Literature,
vi, 78). But what penalty did he, who was so
bitter against Ireland, pay for his own incursions
into the same forbidden land?

The story of the Ireland forgeries raises several
reflections. For here were documents fabricated
by a mere boy, of no special learning or education,
and, instead of being in any way concealed, ex-
posed most openly to publicity and criticism; yet
in an age of learning they deceived many of the very
elect of the learned world. What then may not have
been possible in the line of forgery in the times when
a forger had no publicity, no scrutiny, no printed
version of his fabrications to reckon with? The
possibilities were simply limitless, and almost justify
the scepticism of Hardouin, the Jesuit, who held that
248 LITERARY FORGERIES

most of the Greek and Latin classics were the works
of the monks in the middle ages. Such scepticism
would undoubtedly be too far-reaching, but it is
hardly inadmissible on the score of an apparent
absence of motive. The mere amusement of a hoax
upon his father, and men of learning generally, ap-
pears to have been young Ireland’s primary or only
motive. Yet the apparent absence of motive was
one of the chief arguments in favour of the docu-
ments adduced by believers in them. What motive,
they asked, could a forger have had in producing
documents of such variety, exposing himself to fresh
risk of detection in every one he added to their
number ; and what did it conduce to the palming off as
Shakespeare’s of his own edition of “ King Lear” to
forge such a document as the Deed of Trust to John
Hemynge? Would a forger have cast such imputa-
tions on Shakespeare’s character as are cast on it in
that deed? All these arguments were as justifiable
as they are familiar, yet they were all erroneous.
And how many arguments based on a grzorz specula-
tions of the probable or improbable workings of a
forger’s mind, like those, for instance, in such a work
as Paley’s Hore Pauline, are discredited by the
literary controversy that raged round these Shake-
spearian forgeries?

Questions of style and spelling apart, the be-
lievers in the forgeries had a stronger main argument
than their opponents: it was far more likely that the
papers were genuine than that any individual could
THE IMMORTAL HOAX OF IRELAND 249

have had time or motive sufficient to forge them.
Yet they were forged in a very short time, by a very
simple process, and by a youth of no experience in
literature. If ever there was an incident calculated
to inspire learning with a perception of the wisdom
of sobriety and modesty of judgment in matters
literary, and of an absence of dogmatism, it was the
case of the lad in the lawyer’s office who for his own
sport carried such unspeakable havoc into the camp
of the learned.
CHAPTER XV.
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS.

THERE are few books to which the world owes more
pleasure than it does to John Pinkerton’s Codlec-
tron of the best and most Interesting Voyages and
Travels in all Parts of the World, which was first
published in 1808, when the collector was in his
fiftieth year. He also enlightened the world on the
subject of medals and Scotch history, and amused it
by his unwearied declamations on the inferiority of
the Celt.

But he, too, had, at least in his earlier days, no
scruple about deceiving the world, and has in conse-
quence his place amongst the forgers of literature.
He was only eighteen when he set to work on the
ballad of ‘“ Hardyknute,” which he edited with a
second part in 1781 together with twenty-one other
Scottish Tragic Ballads. Two years later he pub-
lished a second edition with a second volume of
Comic Ballads.

But the second year, Ritson, the antiquary, ap-
peared on the scene, in a somewhat fiery temper.
In a letter in the Gentleman's Magazine (November,

1874) he proclaimed the forgery of some of these
250
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 251

ballads. “Your success,” he writes, addressing
Pinkerton, “has doubtless fully gratified your ex-
pectations, and the dexterity of a pickpocket may
vie with the impudence of a highwayman.” Ritson
elsewhere declares that “the history of Scottish
poetry exhibits a series of fraud, forgery and im-
posture, practised with impunity and success,” and
that “the forgeries of Hector Boethius, David
Chalmers, George Buchanan, Thomas Dempster,
Sir John Bruce, William Lauder, James Macpher-
son, and John Pinkerton, stamp a disgrace upon the
national character, which ages of exceptional integrity
will be required to remove” (Historical Essay on
Scottish Song, 63).

Ritson at all events prevented Pinkerton from
forging any more Scotch poetry with either impunity
or success. The letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine
can have been no soft punishment, and with it went
all hope in that direction. Pinkerton claimed to have
given the ballad of ‘‘ Hardyknute” ‘in its original
perfection” ; it was “certainly the most noble pro-
duction in this style that ever appeared in the world”.
For the recovered stanzas he was indebted “to the
memory of a lady in Lanarkshire ”.

In reality ‘“‘ Hardyknute” was of no older date
than 1719, when it first appeared at Edinburgh as a
fragment in a small folio. In his Preface to Auczent
Scottish Poems, published in 1786, Pinkerton declared
that he really believed in the antiquity of the first
part of the ballad ; as to the second part “the editor
252 LITERARY FORGERIES

must now confess himself guilty,” and he craved the
pardon of his friends and of the public.

With regard to other ballads which Ritson had
also denounced as forgeries in his collection, ‘“‘ The
Laird of Woodhouselie,” ‘‘ Lord Livingstone,” ‘“ Bin-
norie,” “The Death of Monteith,” and “I wish I
were where Helen lies,” all purporting to have been
collected from tradition, the real and then youthful
author wrote as follows: ‘Since the editor of these
volumes is in the confessional he must not omit that
in the first volume, besides the second part of ‘ Hardy-
knute, No. 16, ‘The Laird of Woodhouselie,’ is
written by him, as is No. 17, ‘Lord Livingstone,’ yet
of both he had small lines from tradition. No. 13,
‘ Binnorie,’ is one-half from tradition, one-half by the
editor, though he could not now himself distinguish
the lines. No. 19, ‘Death of Monteith,’ is wholly
by the editor, upon no tradition whatever. . . . No.
21, ‘I wish I were where Helen lies,’ is all the
editor’s ; save the three first lines, which he heard a
lady repeat.”

Ritson therefore had been perfectly justified in
saying of this little volume of Zvagic Ballads that
its most prominent feature was ‘“‘the studied and
systematic forgery” that pervaded the whole. This
he saidin 1794, when he published two small volumes
of Scott?sh Songs of his own collecting. In the
meantime in 1786 Pinkerton, pleading his youth and
his desire to please the public in extenuation of his
earlier fraud, had brought out his two volumes of
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 253

Ancient Scottish Poems from the MS. collections
of Sir Richard Maitland in the Pepysian Library at
Cambridge. It is hardly to be wondered at that this
second publication aroused much suspicion, and that
Pinkerton’s detailed account of the Maitland MSS.
was by some regarded as a fabrication. Chambers
in his Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotchmen
declared that “this forgery was one of the most
audacious in the annals of transcribing”. But for
this charge there was no justification ; Pinkerton this
time treated the reading public honestly, and the
MSS. in question may be seen at Cambridge to this
very day.

Pinkerton enjoyed some revenge over Ritson,
when the latter published his collection of Scottish
songs in 1794, for in the Scots Magazine he availed
himself to the full of the privilege of the man whose
enemy has had the indiscretion to write a book.
Yet the verdict of posterity must be on the side
of Ritson, but for whose sagacity and intervention
the younger author might have been tempted to still
further and more extensive experiments upon public
credulity. It was Ritson who elicited the ultimate
confession of deception, and to whom the cause of the
purity of letters must always remain indebted for his
detection of a shameless attempt at deception and for
his timely and salutary castigation of the deceiver.

The great master of ballad lore, Sir Walter Scott,
had no sympathy with the noble rage of Ritson
against ballad-forgers. He wrote, in April, 1830:
284 LITERARY FORGERIES

‘There is no small degree of cant in the violent
invectives with which impostors of this nature have
been assailed. Ifa young author wishes to circulate
a beautiful poem under the guise of antiquity, the
public is surely more enriched by the contribution
than injured by the deception.” He adds that ‘it
is hardly possible to succeed in deceiving those who
have made this branch of literature their study”.
But the forgery of a ballad, “as it must rest on de-
ception, cannot be altogether honourable” (Border
Minstrelsy, 1833, i., 16, 17).

Sir Walter, as is said later, was himself taken in
by several ballads forged by Surtees of Mainsforth.
But had he been undeceived, he would only have
laughed, though Surtees’ part in the affair ‘‘ was
hardly an honourable one”. Scott was a lover of
poetry first, antiquarianism was only a good second
in his affections. There is a legend about a novelist
who induced a divine to advertise a pious romance
of his, and being a light-hearted person, cried, ‘I
have spoofed the old boy first shot”. Was Sir
Walter, as a ballad collector, spoofed first shot by
James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd? Was the ballad
of “Auld Maitland,” obtained from oral recitation by
Scott just after the publication of the first edition of
his Border Minstrelsy (spring of 1802), a concoction
by James Hogg? “A hoax was to Hogg as the
breath of his nostrils,” says Lockhart, but did Hogg
hoax Scott in 1802 with “Auld Maitland”? Is the
ballad a forgery?
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 255

Here we must enter into details. Professor
Child does not print “ Auld Maitland” in his vast
collection of ballads. In the small early edition of
1861, he is ‘inclined to agree with Aytoun that this
ballad is a modern imitation, or, if not that, of com-
paratively recent composition”. Rather curiously
Scott gives two different accounts of how he obtained
the ballad. Writing to Ellis in the autumn of 1802
he says that he and Leyden were much surprised
when the ballad ‘“‘was presented to us copied down
from the recitation of an old shepherd by a country
farmer,” who, almost certainly, was Will Laidlaw,
later Scott’s friend, steward and amanuensis (Lock-
hart’s Scott, ii, 99, 100). Inthe Border Minstrelsy
Scott gives the ballad as ‘‘ written down from the
recitation of the mother of James Hogg, who sings,
or rather chaunts it, with great animation. She
learned the ballad from a blind man who died at
the advanced age of ninety.” Hogg’s “ Lines to Sir
W. Scott” give a vivid picture of the effect on the
poet of his mother’s recitation :—

“When Maitland’s song first met your ear,

How the furled visage up did clear,

Beaming delight ! though now a shade

Of doubt would darken into dread

That some unskilled presumptious arm

Had marred tradition’s mighty charm.
Scarce grew thy lurking dread the less,

Till she, the ancient minstreless,

With fervid voice, and kindling eye,

And withered arms waving on high,
256 LITERARY FORGERIES

Sang forth these words in eldritch shriek,
While tears stood on thy nut-brown cheek—

‘Na, we are nane o’ the lads o’ France,
Nor e’er pretend to be;

We be three lads of fair Scotland,
Auld Maitland’s sons, a’ three!’

Thy fist made all the table ring—
‘By ——, sir, but that is the thing ’.”

Now the blind man seems to have been either
the shepherd from whose recitation the farmer had
taken a written copy, or, more probably, the shep-
herd was of the Laidlaw clan, namely, Will of Phau-
hope, an uncle of Hogg’s, who, to his nephew’s
disgust, deserted minstrelsy for the works of the
early leaders of the Secession, such as the Rev.
Ralph Erskine (Letters of Str W. Scott, i., 12, 13).
Hogg’s account, in Domestic Manners of Sir Walter
Scott (1838), is that his mother recited the ballad to
Scott, and that the original source, as far as she
knew, was Auld Barbara Maitland, the housekeeper
of “the first laird of Tushielaw”. She must have
meant the first of the Anderson lairds, who succeeded
the ancient Scott lairds of Tushielaw. It thus ap-
pears that both the aged shepherd and Mrs. Hogg
knew the ballad, and it is highly improbable that
James Hogg first forged it and then made old people
learn the long ballad by rote, “and the same with
intent to deceive”. The ballad is about “ Maitland
upon auld bierd grey,” celebrated by Gawain Douglas
(about 1510-1520) in a list of heroes of romance.
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 257

And in the Maitland MSS. of about 1570 there is a
reference to Auld Sir Richard Maitland,

his auld baird grey

And to his noble sonnes three,
the three sons who are the heroes of the ballad,
and enemies to King Edward of England. About
the ballad Hogg wrote to Scott, saying that it was
no forgery; ‘the contrary will be proved by most
of the old people hereabouts having a great part of
it by heart”.

There isin the Maitland MSS. any amount of
proof that, in 1570-1580, Auld Maitland and his three
sons were famous characters of old romance. Only
from the MSS. themselves, or from Pinkerton’s
version of them in his Axczent Scottish Poems of
1792, could Hogg have known the fundamental
facts of the ballad. Enjoying as he did the free run
of William Laidlaw’s book-shelves, and being a sub-
scriber to the library at Peebles, it is possible that in
this way he became acquainted with Pinkerton’s re-
productions of those ancient poems.

Hogg, therefore, if he was the forger, based the
ballad on Pinkerton’s edition of the Maitland MSS.,
adding in brackets four lines of his own, to fill up
the sense of two half-forgotten verses; an artful
mode of deception also adopted by Surtees. He

ce

threw in obsolete words like “sowies” and “ spring-
alds” (pronounced “spring walls” by the reciter) and
‘‘ portcullize,” and he, probably, introduced a note on

various readings by “some reciters”. If Scott wrote
17
258 LITERARY FORGERIES

this note, Scott had heard several reciters. The
obsolete words Hogg might have found in Blind
Harry’s poem of ‘‘ Wallace,” a great favourite of the
Scottish peasantry.

Such then was the unequalled astuteness of Hogg,
if so early as 1802 and so unversed in literature as
he then was, he forged the ballad, and induced old
people to learn it by heart and recite it. The whole
trick seems impossible, and the knowledge of the
ballad by old people appears to indicate that it is
a traditional survival from, perhaps, the sixteenth
century, when, as we know, Auld Maitland and his
three sons were familiar heroes of romance or poetry.
Let us add that Hogg never boasted of ‘“ hoaxing
the Shirra” with this ballad, even after the Shirra
was dead. He still told the same story of his
mother’s recitation of the piece in his Domestic
Manners of Sir Walter Scott. But when the
Shepherd had taken in Jeffrey with a “faked”
Jacobite song, he crowed aloud like chanticleer in
his glee. For these reasons it seems that Professor
Child was too sceptical when he wholly rejected
“Auld Maitland”. Old Barbara Maitland, quoted
by Hogg as his mother’s source, may well have
known a ballad about the glories of her family.

In the matter of ballad-forging, Pinkerton was
far from standing alone. Strange in this respect was
the imposition practised on Sir Walter Scott by
Robert Surtees, the celebrated antiquary and his-
torian of the County of Durham, who not only
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 259

palmed off on Sir Walter as antique three ballads
purely of his own composition, but actually suffered
them to occupy a place in the Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border, with a fictitious account of their
origin, and left him deceived to the end of his days.

The ‘‘ Death of Featherstonhaugh,” supposed to
relate an incident in the clan feuds of the Ridleys and
the Featherstones, was represented to be an ‘“‘old
Northumbrian ballad”. The novelist tells us in his
innocence that “
tion of an old woman eighty years of age, mother of
one of the miners in Alston-moor, by the agent of the
lead mines there, who communicated it to my friend,
R. Surtees, Esq. of Mainsforth. She had not, she
said, heard it for many years; but, when she was a
girl, it used to be sung at merry-makings, till the roof
rang again.”

Sir Walter never suspected these old women of
his friend Surtees. It was another old woman, Anne
Douglas, who weeded in Surtees’ garden, from whom
Surtees obtained the ‘beautiful fragment” called
“ Bartram’s Dirge”. In this case the real composer
inserted within brackets certain words and lines which
he professed to have added to certain defective stanzas,
thereby naturally averting all suspicion that all the
eight stanzas of the poem were entirely his own.
Could deception have been more subtle?

And yet a third song, called “‘ Lord Ewrie,” also
of eight stanzas, was included by Sir Walter in

his collection, It was, he says, “written down by
7 *

it was taken down from the recita-
260 LITERARY FORGERIES

my obliging friend, Robert Surtees, Esq. of Mains-
forth, from the recitation of Rose Smith, of Bishop
Middleham, a woman aged upwards of ninety-one,
whose husband’s father and two brothers were killed
in the affairof1715”, But here again the old woman
was Surtees himself, he being the sole author of the
poem. Toa man like Surtees, in whose honour the
Surtees Society was founded, much no doubt may
fairly claim to be forgiven, and the fraud he practised
on Sir Walter would possibly have been condoned
by that good-humoured victim. Still, Surtees’ con-
ception of the duties of friendship strikes one as
singular.

And the ease with which Sir Walter was deceived
in these three cases reflects seriously on his trust-
worthiness as a guide with regard to the antiquity of
other ballads collected in his Wznstrelsy. In no line
of literature has forgery found an easier field than in
that of ancient ballads: the pleasure and ease of
deceiving the learned being doubtless the primary
motive. Thus Lady Wardlaw was the real authoress
in 1719 of the famous ballad of ‘‘ Hardyknute,”
which she pretended to have found written on shreds
of old paper ; and her hand has been suspected in
certain other ballads that pass for ancient.

In the nineteenth century the Rev. R. S. Hawker
“was amused” to see his ballad, “Sir Beville,” in-
serted in a collection of old ballads; whilst his ballad
of “Trelawney” was not only accepted as genuine
by Scott, Macaulay and Dickens, but in 1846 it was
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 261

printed in Mr. Dixon’s Ancient Poems, Ballads,
Songs of the Peasantry of England, taken down from
Oral Tradition, published by the Percy Society in
1832. Yet Hawker had avowed himself its author
in the year 1825!

The Surtees’ forgeries make a bad story, but a
case of even worse forgery, though of better poetry,
is afforded by the fraud practised by Allan Cunning-
ham on Mr. Cromek in 1809. Cromek was travelling
in that year in Dumfriesshire, partly with a view to a
future Collection of Scottish songs, and he had the
good fortune, as he deemed it, to make the acquaint-
ance of Allan, then a youthful stone-mason of only
twenty-five, earning eighteen shillings a week, and
knowing much of the poetry of the district. When
the idea occurred to Cromek of bringing out a volume
of old songs collected from the peasantry, Allan
undertook to collect what he could in Nithsdale and
Galloway. In due course, when Cromek had re-
turned to London, certain “ancient ballads” began
to reach him from Cunningham: first the ballad
‘ She’s gane to dwall in Heaven,” and then ‘“‘ Bonnie
Lady Anne”.

With the first ballad Cromek was justly delighted,
declaring to its real author in a letter (27th October,
1809) that he did not know anything ‘“ more touching,
more simply pathetic, in the whole range of Scottish
song”. But some acute criticism accompanied this
eulogy. Could it be more than ninety years old?
In old ballads there were no abstract ideas, like
262 LITERARY FORGERIES

“‘gudeness,” nor compound epithets, like ‘‘death-
cold”. As to the epithet “fell,” that must have
crept into the song through the ignorance of reciters ;
it would have to be removed, and its removal not
mentioned. But, despite these flaws, Cromek had
read the verses to his old mother, his wife, sister and
family, till all their hearts ached.

In the Remazns of Nithsdale and Galloway Song,
which Cromek published the year following (1810),
with the collaboration of Cunningham, the ballad’s age
is referred to “about the time of the Reformation”.
Its subject was the daughter of the Laird Maxwell,
of Cowhill, on the banks of the Nith, called by the
peasantry ‘“‘the lilie of Nithsdale,” who died at nine-
teen. Cromek may have believed this, and expected
the British public also to believe it.

But still more curious is the story in the same
volume of the origin of “ Bonnie Lady Anne”. It was
alleged to have been introduced into Nithsdale about
thirty years before by a lady of deranged mind, who
wandered about, followed by some tamed sheep.
She was mild and amiable, and would lie all night
under some tree, with her sheep round her. These
sheep were to her as daughters, eating of her bread,
drinking of her cup. She used to sing this song
unmoved till she came to the last verse, when she
would burst into tears. The old tree, under which
she generally sat, had been cut down, but whilst it
stood the schoolboys paid it a sort of religious
respect, and on fine Sabbath evenings the old women
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 263

of the place would sit there, reading their Bibles,
whilst the young men and maidens learned their
Psalms, and “then went home full of the meek and
holy composure of religion”.

Truly Cunningham, whom Sir Walter Scott after-
wards described as ‘‘honest Allan,” had a most cir-
cumstantial imagination. The Remains, of which
Allan claimed the whole composition, “both poetry
and prose,” save two scraps, are probably as full of
falsity as anything in the English language. Among
them is a poem ‘‘ We were Sisters, we were Seven,”
of which he tells us that it was copied ‘from the
recital of a peasant woman of Galloway, upwards of
ninety years of age”. It was one of a “considerable
number” copied from the same old woman, “all
evidently productions of a very remote date,” ze.,
the year 1810. Well might Cunningham, writing to
his brother on toth September, 1810, make the
following proud boast: “I could cheat a whole
General Assembly of Antiquarians with my original
manner of writing and forging ballads”. And from
another letter (29th December, 1810) to the same
brother, this is of interest about the Remazus: ‘‘ These
songs and ballads being written for imposing on the
country as the reliques of other years, I was obliged
to have recourse to occasional coarseness, and severity,
and negligence, which would make them appear as
fair specimens of the ancient song and ballad”. Oh!
Honest Allan, so bashful when you first went to
London that you really ‘‘could not utter a known
264 LITERARY FORGERIES

falsehood above three or four times a day,” high is
the rank you won in the army of literary impostors.

Yet if Allan forged, he did it with great ability,
and the same path that led Chatterton to despair led
Cunningham to success. When the Remazus ap-
peared, they acquired an immediate reputation, though
most of the critics seem to have detected the fraud.
A single bound copy of the volume is said to have
been all that fell to Cunningham’s share, who had
really composed almost the whole of it, ballads, intro-
duction and notes, Cromek only being the editor or
publisher. Cromek himself died in March, 1812,
some fifteen months after the publication, and he is
supposed to have believed to the last in the genuine-
ness of the ballads. But this is difficult to believe.
There is an undated letter from him to Cunningham,
in which he begs for the names of the Nithsdale and
Galloway poets; but he can hardly have been ignor-
ant after, if not before, the publication, that the only
poet concerned was Cunningham himself. His
memory may be entitled to the benefit of the doubt,
but not even the excellence of the ballads forged as
ancient by Cunningham, nor the excellence and
success of much of his subsequent work, can free
Cunningham from the blame of a gross and cruel
deception practised on one who relied on_ his
honesty.

Even Motherwell, author of an excellent work
on Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (1827), did
not altogether escape from a temptation to which
AMONG THE BALLAD FORGERS 265

Pinkerton, Surtees and Cunningham succumbed.
The Cavalier’s Song, beginning with—
A steed, a steed of matchless speede,
A sword of metal keene,

was introduced to the world as “written in an old
hand in a copy of Lovelace’s Lucasta, London,
1679,” Motherwell himself being its real parent.

And if literary fraud of this kind was so easy and
attractive in the eighteenth century, how much easier
it must have been in earlier centuries, before experi-
ence had taught criticism the lesson of suspicion.
What, for instance, should be thought of the verses,
entitled ‘“‘Majesty in Misery,” said to have been
composed by Charles I. during his captivity at Caris-
brooke? Washetheir real author? The evidence
is far from satisfactory. Burnet, in his Memoirs of
James and Witham, Dukes of Hamilton (1673), was
the first to print them, and he did so on the authority
of “‘a very worthy gentleman, who had the honour
of waiting on him (the king) there, and was much
trusted by him”. This unnamed person it was who
copied the verses from the original, and vouched for
the truth of the copy (433). But if this gentleman
had been as worthy as described, why should there
have been this concealment of his name? One can-
not but fear that he had no more material existence
than those very old women on whom Surtees and
Cunningham relied for the deception of the credu-
lous.

If any one could have successfully “faked” a
266 LITERARY FORGERIES

ballad, it would have been Sir Walter Scott himself.
His ballad of ‘‘ Elspeth of the Burnfoot,” in the battle
of Harlaw, in the Axtiguary, seems too good not to
be antique. It can hardly be doubted that, both in
“ Kinmont Willie” and “ Jamie Telfer,’ Scott wrote
the four or five most stirring verses, helping out the
weakness of the texts as they had reached him.
Almost any reader can detect the hand of the master
here and there. The business of the forger is to
avoid being too poetical, and to shun a superfluity of
old-fashioned words, while retaining a just measure
of spirit in the narrative. If a man were allowed
to lie freely about the source of his forgery, and to
employ a scholarly writer of an old hand, using
yellow old fly-leaves for paper, and ink rendered
brown by well-known processes, he might even now
deceive the experts.
CHAPTER XVI.
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES.

Ir is inevitable in a survey of the large space oc-
cupied by forgery in literature that many instances
of literary fraud should escape notice altogether.
The view has to be comprehensive rather than ex-
haustive, and to confine itself to types and illustra-
tions rather than to provide a mere catalogue of
cases. The omission of several familiar flowers of
artificial literature must find its excuse in this con-
sideration ; the object being rather an impressionist
picture than a canvas too crowded with detail.

There remain, however, still some cases of the
craftsman’s art, without some knowledge of which
only an incomplete idea can be formed of the uni-
versality of the forger’s genius. It will be seen that
there is no province of the intellectual world which
he has left uninvaded, no position so eminent as to
have daunted him from the attempt to occupy it for
himself. Both his skill and his audacity deserve, or
even demand, some meed of a reluctant admiration.

In that portion of the literary field which is oc-

cupied by the thick crop of works of the imagination
267
268 LITERARY FORGERIES

the forger has diligently sown his tares, and the
names of some distinguished novelists have been
borrowed by sundry literary adventurers. One would
expect such names only to have been so borrowed
when their models were no longer alive to expose
the fraud ; but some have been so bold as to make
free with an author's name even in his lifetime.

Of such was George W. Haering, who, under
the pseudonym of Willibald Alexis, came to be one
of Germany’s first novelists in the early part of the
nineteenth century. But he began with a work of
bad promise, when in the year 1824 at the age
of thirty-seven he published his first work, called
Walladmor, At the Easter book-fairs at Leipsic
it seems to have been common, in default of any
new work of distinction, to publish some forgery as
the work of some famous writer; and to this custom
Walladmor owed its birth. The book appeared as
a free translation into German of a novel boldly
ascribed to Sir Walter Scott; and the next year it
was as freely translated back again in London from
German into English.

Prefixed to the third volume of this novel, Haering
wrote a dedicatory preface to Sir Walter Scott, where-
in he complained of his difficulty in having to trans-
late the sheets just as they arrived dripping wet from
the Edinburgh press, regardless either of sense or
connexion. And he added: “The world pretends
to doubt whether the novel is really yours. . . . From
your obliging disposition, Sir Walter, I anticipate the
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES 269

gratification of a few lines by the next post establish-
ing the authenticity of Walladmor.”

The German public, gulled by this impudent ruse,
greedily devoured the novel as indubitably Scott’s ;
and such was its success that three years later (1827)
the author made another attempt on the credulity of
his countrymen, by publishing another Scottian novel,
entitled Scdoss Avalon. In the preface to this Hae-
ring complained of the stupidity of people who had
failed to perceive in Walladmor a satirical attack
on the craze then prevalent for Scott’s works; and
Julian Scmidt, in his German Literature of the
Nineteenth Century (iii., 261), to some extent accepts
this plea, contending that Wa//admor only developed
into deliberate imitation after beginning with a merely
satirical intention. But there was certainly no attempt
to make it clear to German readers that they were
being regaled with a satire on Scott, and not with
Scott himself: a distinction which is a fairly well-
marked one. Haering was fortunate in finding a
public that was either forgetful or forgiving.

But most mimetic attempts on Scott hailed from
France. Quérard ascribes to MM. Callet and
Pagnon two novels which were published at Paris
as being Scott’s, each in two volumes: Alan
Cameron (1832) and Aymé Verd (1842). In 1844
Charles J. David, son of the famous French painter,
introduced to the world as Scott’s La Pythze des
Liighlands in two volumes. Born in 1783 David
was then sixty-one years of age, having been Pro-
270 LITERARY FORGERIES

fessor of Greek, first at Chios, then at Smyrna, and
finally Professor of Greek Literature at Paris from
1831 to 1840. From so unlikely a source came this
story of the Highland Pythoness, the half-crazy,
half-inspired Mac-Maggy, who proves to be a
Countess of Forfar, and who by her influence with
the wild Highlanders induces them to rise in sup-
port of Prince Charles Edward in 1745. Both her
character and that of Sir James Gregory, the Baillie
of Ersnorth, are drawn with much cleverness after
Scott’s manner, and the whole atmosphere of the
plot savours of Scott; but one can hardly believe
that Scott could have described a disturbed grouse
as rising “perpendicularly like an arrow” 300 feet
into the air, and at that height being brought down
by a gun (i., 209), Scott would never have accused
a grouse of soaring into the sky like a lark.

The story of the novel was ingenious. The
Abbé de la Rue, for fifty years a collector of old
Norman ballads, had gone to England at the time
of the French Revolution, and had there made the
acquaintance of Scott, with whom he kept up a con-
stant correspondence. When he died (about 1839),
amongst a great bundle of papers was found this
novel, with a dedicatory letter by Sir Walter, dated
1st December, 1831. Scott describes how, when the
Abbé recited some of these old pieces, he listened
with gaping mouth and strained ears; how writing
down from memory these fragments on a sheet of
paper he made them the epigraphs of chapters, which
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES 271

gradually swelled into a volume ; how he scrupled
to print it when pressed to do so by Ballantyne,
and therefore sent it to the Abbé, not intending to
publish it till the Abbé’s own projected work on
Norman minstrelsy had first been published : which
was not till 1834, two years after Scott’s own death.
It was from this book in three volumes on Les
Bardes Normands et Anglo-Normands that David
really drew all the epigraphs of his twenty chapters,
at a date when it was no longer possible for Scott
or the Abbé to disavow their mutual connexion.

In 1845 David published another novel as an
unpublished one by Scott, called Le Pvroscrit des
Hebrides, which describes how after the battle of
Culloden the wonderful Mac-Maggy effected the
escape of Charles Edward, on whose head alive or
dead a reward of £30,000 had been placed, and how
after marvellous adventures the object of her loyal
devotion escaped in a vessel from the shores of
Scotland. To this novel no preface was vouchsafed
by its real author or by Scott.

More in the nature of a satire or parody than of
a forgery was J. K. Paulding’s Lay of the Scottish
Fiddle; A Tale of Havre du Grace, Supposed to be
written by Walter Scott, Esg., published in New
York. But its editor claimed rather more for it than
this in his preface. The poem had been sent to him
by a friend in Edinburgh, where it was “universally
attributed to Scott”. A bookseller, after the brilliant
naval feats of Admiral Cockburn in the Anglo-
272 LITERARY FORGERIES

American war in 1814, had asked Scott to celebrate
them in a poem, and this he had done between a
Monday and a Saturday. Nevertheless the editor
would not vouch for its authenticity ; though he ,ad-
duced internal evidences of its genuineness.

But perhaps the most interesting of all the
attempts to trade on Scott's name was that con-
nected with the name of E. de Saint Maurice Cabany,
Director-General of the Society of Archivistes of
France, who in 1855 startled the literary world with
a newly discovered novel by Scott, entitled Moredun :
A Tale of the 1210. Messrs. Sampson Low, who
published the work in England, vouched for their
belief in the Frenchman’s sincerity, and the very
improbability of the story would of itself have seemed
to entitle it to credence.

An eccentric German merchant in Paris (whose
name even is not given), indebted to Cabany about
the year 1825 for some literary assistance, left him
at his death in 1831, when the decline of his fortunes
admitted of no better gift, a simple writing-desk.
But this desk never reached Cabany’s possession
till September, 1854; the merchant’s widow and
daughter having taken it away with them from Paris,
and deeming the box of insufficient value to send
to Cabany till the chance visit of a relative to Paris
admitted of its conveyance thither free of charge.
In this desk were some Royalist tracts; the MS. of
Moredun ; and a letter from W. S. (Walter Scott)
to W. S. (William Spenser) dated 4th November,
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES 273

1826: which was the day after Spenser can be proved
by Scott’s Journal to have breakfasted with Scott at
the Hotel Windsor in Paris.

The facsimile of this letter, prefixed to the pub-
lished novel, shows a close resemblance to the writ-
ing of Scott, and though George Huntly Gordon,
who had transcribed thirty-four volumes of Scott’s
novels in the days of his anonymity, found fault
with some of the letters, there is no doubt that, if
not by Sir Walter's hand, both the letter of 4th
November and all the three volumes of the novel
were composed in the most exact imitation of his
handwriting.

According to this letter, Sir Walter, who had
previously made a gift of JJoredun to his daughter
Anne, persuaded her to transfer it to his friend
Spenser (the author of Zhe Grave of Gelert and
other poems) for the sake of the German merchant,
whilst himself believing that the said merchant was
none other than Spenser himself. In making the
gift Sir Walter only stipulated that, if Spenser ever
published it, he should publish it under his own
initials, and should do all he fairly could to publish
it as really ‘a bairn of his ain”.

Such was Cabany’s story of his acquisition of the
novel : Scott gave it to Spenser; who gave or sold
it to the German; who left it to Cabany. And the
German had often spoken of his possession or ex-
pected possession of a manuscript by Scott, of whom,

as of Goethe, he was an ardent admirer,
18
274 LITERARY FORGERIES

Improbable as this story is, it contains at first
sight no flagrant impossibility. And the novel
itself has something of Scott’s style as well as of his
handwriting : an interview between King John of
England and William the Lion of Scotland vividly
recalls the interview in Quentin Durward between
Louis XI. of France and Charles, Duke of Burgundy.
But there is one little point which alone seems ab-
solutely fatal to Cabany’s story. There occurs the
. following allusion to Newcastle: “In one of the
narrow streets which wound up tortuously from the
Sandhill to the Castle of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
some traces of which still resist the improving hands
of time, money, and Granger”. This passage must
have been written after Granger had laid his im-
proving hand on the town. But it was not before
1832, the year of Scott’s death, that Granger bought
for £50,000 those sites in Newcastle which he
afterwards so much embellished; nor was it before
a Thursday in May, 7834, that a meeting of the
Common Council held a meeting to consider his
plans (Richardson's Guzde to Newcastle, 325). How
then could Scott in a novel given to Spenser in 1826
have had this prophetic knowledge of Granger's im-
provements ?

This Granger allusion is surely an insuperable
obstacle to a belief in Scott’s authorship. But what
then becomes of Cabany’s story of the old man often
alluding to such a possession as actual or prospective,
or of his having left it ina writing-desk? For he
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES 275

is said to have died in 1831, and no one can have
written that passage about Granger during Scott’s
lifetime. No one therefore can have palmed off
such a work on the old German, and it is difficult to
see how Cabany’s story of his connexion with the
novel can be otherwise than deliberately false.

Nor can any one have palmed it off upon Cabany ;
for how should any one have known about the
German and the writing-desk? The whole responsi-
bility seems thus to be thrown upon Cabany : be-
tween whom and Scott the choice of parentage lies.
Yet Cabany’s honesty was unsuspected by his
English publishers, and a more plausible story would
surely have lain open to his invention. The mystery
must remain unsolved. Whoever the culprit was,
he had a most intimate knowledge of English topo-
graphy ; he knew well the country about Hexham ;
had seen the remarkable thirteenth century monu-
ment to a lady and child in Scarcliffe Church ; and
described, in a chapter headed “ Ingleborough,” the
Craven district of Yorkshire, the Ebbing and Flowing
well at Giggleswick, and the Weathercote Cave near
Ingleton, with a fidelity that could hardly have come
save from actual knowledge of the district. It is
possible, though hardly probable, that a Frenchman
might have had such knowledge.

Next to Scott the name of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe,
best known by her JZystertes of Udolpho, has been
of most frequent service to writers whose diffidence

of their own powers to attract has tempted them to
18 *
276 LITERARY FORGERIES

trade on the powers of others. Mrs. Radcliffe’s re-
liance for effect on ruined castles and spectres opened
up a field of temptingly easy cultivation, and she
accordingly found herself compelled to disown in the
English press numerous different romances with
which her name became falsely connected. That
very prolific French writer, the Baron de Lamothe-
Langon, who seems to have regarded all literary
names as common property, published two novels as
translations from Mrs. Radcliffe, of which he was him-
self the.sole author: one was L’ Hermite de la tombe
Mysterteuse, which professed to be by Mrs. Radcliffe
extracted from some annals of the thirteenth century,
and to have been translated by De Langon (1815); the
other was the Mystéres de la Tour St. Jean, also pur-
porting to be a translation from Mrs. Radcliffe (1818).

But the most interesting of these Radcliffe works
is the Rose d Altenberg, ou le Spectre dans les ruines,
translated in 1830 by M. Henri Duval from an
English manuscript said to have been found ‘‘in the
portfolio of the late Ann Radcliffe”. This book en-
joyed an eventful career under several aliases. First
of all it appeared in 1813 as A/exina, a four-volumed
novel imitated from the English by Mme. Brayer
de Saint-Leon; then Mrs, Campbell published a
translation of it as her own work in 1821 as Zhe
Midnight Wanderer ; and finally M. Duval brought
back the Wanderer to France by re-translating it as
the Rose d Altenberg, recovered from the capacious
Radcliffe portfolio.
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES 277

The Memoirs, Letters, or Souvenirs of distin-
guished people occupy the borderland between pure
fiction and history, and offer naturally a rich harvest
to the historian. But they are thickly strewn with
traps for the unwary, and call for the exercise of
much circumspection. Unwise indeed would he be
who should attempt to draw truth from these deep
wells of deception unaided by Quérard’s monu-
mental dictionary of literary deception (Supercheries
Littéraires Dévoilées).

Take, for instance, Frederic II. of Prussia; for
him alone were invented by different writers his
Pensées sur la Religion ; his Derniéres Pensées ; his
Bréviatre Philosophique; his Matinées du Rot du
Prusse; his Consetls du Tréne to the kings and
peoples of Europe; to say nothing of some un-
published letters, and a Testament.

No topic was a greater favourite with inventive
writers than such political testaments. Besides
Frederic, Cardinals Richelieu and Alberoni, Rous-
seau, Voltaire, Colbert, and the Emperor Joseph II.,
all left the world the richer for legacies of wisdom
for which they are not responsible.

It is only possible to skim the surface of this
bottomless sea. To Lamothe-Langon, the trans-
lator of two of the imaginary novels by Mrs. Rad-
cliffe, we owe in addition four volumes of Memozrs
by Mme. du Barry; six volumes of Jemozrs by
Richelieu (1829); and four volumes of Memoirs by
Talleyrand (1838). And for all who go to history
278 LITERARY FORGERIES

for amusement rather than for truth these ingenious
fabrications are not lacking in charm. They often
give the aroma of a period better than works that
profess a greater regard for actuality. Of such are
the interesting Souvenirs of the Marquise de Créquy,
from 1710 to 1803, supposed to be addressed to her
grandson, but mainly composed, possibly with some
aid from the Marquise, by M. Cousin, Comte de
Courchamps, who first published them in seven vol-
umes at Paris in 1834; and lately (1904) reproduced
in England in abridged form under the title of Zhe
French Noblesse of the Eighteenth Century by Mrs.
Colquhoun Grant. A work of similar style and
merit is ascribed to the Marquis Barbé-Marbois,
who published in London in 1774 four small volumes
of letters for which Mme. de Pompadour was
claimed as the author between 1753 and 1762. It
was a clever compilation, to which the use of con-
temporary anecdotes lent a misleading semblance of
truth. The editor’s story was that he had bought
the letters from the executor of that famous lady’s
secretary, who had then lately died in Holland. But
of such stories and of such works the name is
Legion.

A conclusion of forgeries in these miscellaneous
paths of literature may fitly be made with one which
gave no small occupation to criticism in the early
days of the nineteenth century. When Charles
Vanderbourg published in 1803 the first edition of
the poems of Marguerite - Eleonore-Clotilde de
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES 279

Vallon-Chalys, afterwards Mme. de Surville, the
book had a great success. Of this Clotilde Vander-
bourg told the following amazing story: that in the
fifteenth century she produced works which sur-
passed in style and versification anything previously
connected with so early a date. Born in 1405, she
wrote wonderful verses at the age of ten or twelve,
and subsequently became the centre of a school of
French poetesses, of whose names the world then
heard for the first time. Married in 1421 to
Berenger de Surville, she composed, on his early
forsaking his bride for the battle-field, a remarkable
poem, called Z’Herozde, whose merits so excited the
jealousy of the poet Alain Chartier that Clotilde
never again sought publicity for her later inspirations.
After surviving her husband, her son, her daughter
and her granddaughter, she closed her poetical career
in her ninety-fourth year by a poem addressed to
Charles VIII. in celebration of his victory at the
battle of Fornoue in 1495.

Vanderbourg professed to have derived both the
poems and the story of Clotilde from Joseph Etienne
de Surville, a descendant of the poetess, born in 1755.
This Joseph led a soldier’s life; emigrated from
France at the Revolution; and on his return to
France was shot in 1798. Joseph’s story was that
he had found his ancestress’ poems whilst rummaging
among some old family archives ; but of the manu-
script so discovered there is no evidence of any eye-
witness but himself. He also found several. books
280 LITERARY FORGERIES

of Memotrs written by his ancestress, and it was
from these Memozrs, never published by himself,
that Vanderbourg drew for his sketch of a line of
French mediaeval poetesses previously unknown to
fame,

So wonderful a story naturally gave rise to the
questions: Were these poems genuine? Had Clo-
tilde ever been clothed in flesh and blood? And
had Joseph de Surville really found these poems and
Memoirs, or had he invented both them and his
ancestress together? Errors and anachronisms came
to be discovered, and a modern spirit to be detected
beneath the medizeval language. Vanderbourg (1765-
1827) fell himself under much suspicion, from which
his memory was not fully rescued till 1863 by three
articles which Macé wrote in the Journal de [In-
struction Publique (31st January, 4th February,
and 28th March, 1863). Vanderbourg had argued
that Joseph was quite incapable of writing poems of
such excellence as those ascribed to Clotilde ; but the
fraud, which the criticisms of Villemain and Sainte-
Beuve ultimately laid bare, can be laid to the charge
of no one else. One is left to wonder that a poet
capable of producing poems so good as Clotilde’s
were admitted to be should have spent some years
of his life in building up a reputation for an imaginary
ancestress when he might with no more labour have
permanently established his own. But to many
minds the mere deception of the world carries its
own exceeding great reward.
SOME MISCELLANEOUS FORGERIES- 281

Another collection of Clotilde’s poems (Poeszes
Inédites) saw the light at Paris in 1826, but this
collection was chiefly remarkable for the reckless
boldness of some of its anachronisms. Clotilde there-
in defended the Copernican system at a time when
Copernicus must have been a mere boy ; she refuted
Lucretius at a time when there were no printed copies
of Lucretius to refute; and she alluded to the satel-
lites of the planet Saturn, though the first of them
was not discovered till 140 years after her death.
But criticism has reason to be thankful when the
facilities or temptations of literary mimicry perplex it
with a problem no harder than this.

And with this poor fraud ends our cursory survey
of the more eminent figures in the world’s well-filled
gallery of forgers. It is a mixed as well as a
crowded gallery, where some are known, and some
are nameless, and where not all are deserving of
the same degree of condemnation. Audacious, de-
signing, but interesting figures, who, in revolt against
the world’s conventional standard, employed letters,
as other men freely and without censure employ
politics: some for mere pecuniary ends, some for
the slaking of political passion, some for the sheer
joy of deceiving their fellows, or of exercising and
displaying their abilities. The conscience of man-
kind esteems literary purity as of higher sanctity
than purity in political conduct, and thus the world

turns a condemning frown on the literary adventurer,
I9
282 LITERARY FORGERIES

whilst reserving its condoning smile for his political
counterpart. But if we accept the world’s verdict
in this respect as roughly just, let us remember that
it was their exceptional talents which were generally
these sinners’ temptations, and that a merciful nature,
by denying to most of us an equality of gifts, has
preserved us from a similar struggle with the moral
law. A blurred vision was theirs, disabling them
from discerning clearly between truth and falsity,
between fact and fiction; but let it at least be
accounted some atonement for this moral defect
that their endeavours reached often no mean level of
intellectual excellence, and that their worst trickeries
paid a kind of inverted tribute to the honour and
glory of literature.

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