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LITERARY FORGERIES 
 
 E. K. CHAMBERS 
 
 THE CHANCELLOR'S ENGLISH ESSAY 
 
 f^ i Cornell University Library 
 
 1891 ! Z1024 .C44 
 
 History and motives of literary forgerie 
 
 3 1924 029 550 989 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029550989 
 
THE HISTORY AND MOTIVES 
 OF TITER A RV FORGERIES 
 
 Being the Chancellor s English Essay 
 for 1891 : by Edmund Kerchever 
 Chambers, sometime Scholar of Corpus 
 Christi College, Oxford 
 
 Published by B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 &- 51 Broad Street, 
 Oxford, and SIMP KIN, MARSHALL &- CO., Stationers 
 Hall Cotirt, London, 1891. 
 
 ^7- 
 

 OXFORD 
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 
THE HISTORY AND MOTIVES OF 
 LITERARY FORGERIES. 
 
 IloAAd ra Sfiva KovSiv dv6pd/TT0v SetvSrfpov jre\ei. 
 
 Soph. Antigone, 33a. 
 
 Now mark! To be precise — 
 Though I say, " lies " all these, at this first stage, 
 'Tis just for science' sake : I call such grubs 
 By the name of what they'll turn to, dragonflies. 
 Strictly, it's what good people style untruth ; 
 But yet, so far, not quite the full-grown thing: 
 It's fancying, fable-making, nonsense-work — 
 What never meant to be so very bad — 
 The knack of story-telling, brightening up 
 Each dull old bit of fact that drops its shine. 
 
 R. Browning. 
 
 The study of literary forgery ought not to be set down 
 as nothing more than an intellectual pastime. At first, 
 indeed, it may appear to be a by-way of letters, attractive to 
 the mind in certain moments and moods, but in the end lead- 
 ing nowhere, like the curious questionings of Tiberius about 
 the songs the Sirens sang, and the name borne by Achilles 
 among the maidens of Scyros *. Yet in reality there is 
 ' more in it ' ; it appeals to the student as well as to the 
 'mere scholar, 'and has no less interest for the profound thinker 
 than for the antiquary. There are epochs of history, phases in 
 the development of philosophies and religions, that can only 
 be fully understood when they are illumined by a knowledge 
 of the conditions under which literary forgery springs up 
 and gains credence. The definition of the canon of the New 
 Testament, the growth in power of the see of Rome, the 
 characteristics of primitive poetry, the genuineness of the 
 writings ascribed to Aristotle, — these are among the subjects 
 for a right handling of which such a knowledge is needful. 
 
 Nor is its value for the historian and the critic alone. In 
 the eyes of the psychologist, the literary forger is a ' human 
 document ' full of facts, an abnormal spiritual growth ready 
 
 * Suetonius, Vita Tiberii, ch. Ixx. 
 A 2 
 
for the knife of analysis, and serving by contrast to advance 
 his studies of the type. The philosopher, in his turn, upon a 
 higher plane of thought, finds in him yet another instrument 
 of the all-pervading elemental ironies. He has a vision of 
 some bookworm, buried in his library and thinking him- 
 self, there, at least, secure from the malice and mockery of 
 the world, until a Psalmanaazaar or a Phalaris comes to 
 trip him up, and the laughter of the heavens rings out. 
 And the man of letters, that characteristic product of the 
 century, who blends historian and psychologist, philosopher 
 and critic in one, he too rriay gather from the same study no 
 less compelling matter for consideration. It presents him 
 with familiar men and ages under fresh aspects, giving him, 
 no doubt, a vision of the seamy side of things, but yet 
 one touched with that charm of novelty which never fails to 
 attract the modern mind. 
 
 There is scarcely a sphere of literary achievement in which 
 the forger has not, at one time or another, made his mark. 
 Science and song own him alike, and he plays the part of a 
 parasite upon every branch of the tree of knowledge. The 
 success with which he frequently meets is striking. From 
 the credulity of the vulgar little else could be expected, but 
 among his dupes are not seldom numbered men of learning 
 and acuteness, able and intelligent critics, specialists in the 
 very study which he has chosen for his ravages. Such 
 indeed is the persistence of man in error, that even an 
 exploded forgery, so long as it retains popular interest at all, 
 rarely ceases to find adherents impervious alike to reason and 
 to ridicule. It is difficult, therefore, after a dispassioned perusal 
 of the records of successful impositions, to retain that confi- 
 dence in criticism as a science and an art without which the 
 garden of literature must seem a pathless waste. Such an 
 experience induces a state of bewildered scepticism, in which 
 the wildest imaginings of the Jesuit Hardouin, hominum para- 
 doxotatos, lose their absurdity. Even his crowning theory, 
 that the works of Cicero, Pliny's Natural History, Vergil's 
 Georgics, and Horace's Epistles and Satires are the sole 
 genuine relics of antiquity, while the rest of classical history 
 and literature are only an ingenious fabrication of the un- 
 lettered thirteenth century, may in time come to have a 
 plausibility of its own *. 
 
 An academic essay ought to start with a definition, but in 
 the present case this is impossible, for neither the generic nor 
 the differentiating idea is exactly fixed. Before you define a 
 literary forgery, you must define literature, and that is a task 
 to 'give the boldest pause.' It may be said that a forgery 
 
 * Biographie Universelle, s. v, Hardouin. 
 
ceases to be literary if it has any object beyond that of being 
 read ; that, for instance, the ^Donation of Constantine is not 
 literary, because it was forged with the object of establishing 
 the temporal power of the Popes. In practice, such a criterion 
 would unduly limit the subject ; thus, it would exclude the 
 love-verses found among the Casket Letters ascribed to Mary 
 Queen of Scots : and yet poetry is presumably literature, 
 more or less. It would also be unmanageable, for the object 
 of a forgery depends upon the motive of the forger, and this 
 is, as often as not, a mystery. Therefore, it will be best to 
 dispense with a definition, and to use the term in the loose but 
 sufficiently clear sense which generally attaches to it. It 
 must not however be extended to cover every kind of spurious 
 literature. Whatever the motive, there must at least be the 
 intention to deceive, either by attributing to a real or 
 imaginary author work that is not his, or by passing off as 
 record of fact what is merely fiction. It is not, of course, 
 possible to say, in the case of every spurious writing, 
 especially in the earlier ages of literature, whether the error 
 is due to the art of a conscious forger, or to the folly of 
 readers and editors. But the distinction is an important one. 
 It may be illustrated from the ordinary editions of Chaucer's 
 poems. In these occur a number of poems which cannot be 
 his, but which have been ascribed to him either because they 
 are found in the same manuscript with works that are 
 undoubtedly genuine, or because the early editors, the Stowes 
 and Speghts of the sixteenth century, failed to distinguish his 
 style from that of his imitators. Two of the traditional Canter- 
 bury Tales will' serve as typical instances. The Tale of Gamelyn 
 is a ballad of the twelfth or thirteenth century. It has been 
 taken for the Cook's Tale, from its position in some of the manu- 
 scripts. Possibly Chaucer had set it aside as material on which 
 to found a tale of his own. The so-called Plowman's Tale is an 
 alliterative poem in the style of Langley, written probably by 
 the author of The Plowman's Creed. These are spurious tales, 
 but they are not therefore forgeries. On the other hand, if 
 we may trust the ingenious theories of Herr Simon of 
 Schmalkanden, the Parson's Tale, as it now stands, is an 
 exceedingly clever forgery. Originally it was a treatise on 
 Penitence, put in the mouth of an heretical Wycliffite priest. 
 With this has been interwoven matter from the French 
 Sermone de Vices etde Vertus of Frere Lorens, with the purpose 
 of giving an orthodox tone to the whole. Herr Simon sets 
 down the fraud to the pious zeal of the monks of St, Mary's, 
 Westminster, who owned the house in which Chaucer died*. 
 
 * Essays on Chaucer {Chaucer Society), Nos. ix. xvi. Skeat, Minor Poems 
 of Chaucer. Morley, English Writers, v. 346. 
 
In itself the term Forgery is not a very pleasant one ; the 
 associations which it calls up are deterrent ; it suggests the 
 dock and the gallows. But, in the present application, it 
 covers numerous cases of very varying ethical complexion, 
 some malignant or sordid enough, others merely humorous. 
 A sense of this discrepancy has led to the invention of 
 the word Pseudepigraphy, which, if cumbersome, is un- 
 deniably colourless, while the French, with their charac- 
 teristic talent for elegant euphemism, prefer to speak of 
 Supercheries. 
 
 The stories of the chief literary forgeries have been told 
 again and again. The narration of them here in any fulness 
 of detail would be cramhe repetita. It would be equally 
 superfluous to examine the arguments by which the authen- 
 ticity of any particular work is attacked or defended. That 
 is, in most cases, a matter best left to specialists. This essay 
 will deal with conclusions. Its object will be twofold : in the 
 first place it will attempt to give a general outline of the 
 history of the practice, tracing, so far as may be, its relative 
 frequency and special developments in different ages ; in the 
 second, it will endeavour to elucidate the social and intellec- 
 tual conditions which favour the growth of forgeries, and to 
 analyse the motives in which they have their origin. These 
 two interdependent points of view, the psychological and 
 the historical, will be adhered to throughout. 
 
 As soon as man set foot on the slopes of Parnassus, the 
 shadow of the forger fell on the path behind him. The first 
 historian records the first literary fraud. Herodotus nar- 
 rates how, during the rule of the Pisistratidae at Athens, a 
 certain Onomacritus, whose duty it was to collect and 
 interpret the oracles of Musaeus, was discovered by Lasus' 
 of Hermione in the act of making an interpolation in the 
 traditional prophecies committed to his care *. Later writers 
 make it clear that this was only one of a number of forgeries 
 of a similar character. Musaeus and Orpheus were the 
 reputed authors of a mass of poetry, popularly supposed to 
 be pre- Homeric, which embodied a mystic theology and was 
 connected in some obscure way with Thrace. Whether they 
 ever had other than a mythical existence, or whether any of 
 the writings ascribed to them were really of remarkable anti- 
 quity,can hardly be determined; but there is abundant evidence 
 that most of the Orphic literature known in historic times dates 
 only from the beginning of the sixth century. Aristotle, a 
 capable critic, as the Poetics show, would appear to have as- 
 cribed the whole of it to Onomacritus and Cercops the 
 
 * Herodotus, Book vii. ch. 6, 
 
Pythagorean *. Ion of Chios declares that even Pythagoras 
 had _ a hand in the authorship, but this testimony is suspect, 
 for if Suidas may be believed, Ion himself was a flagrant 
 offender. Besides Onomacritus, Cercops and Ion, Suidas 
 mentions some half-dozen other writers of the same period, 
 to whom he attributes definite poems t. We may there- 
 fore fairly infer that the manufacture of such pseudo- 
 prophecies was a common practice of the day, resorted to 
 whenever political, personal or controversial exigencies 
 demanded it. But Orphic forgeries were not confined to 
 any one period ; it may be doubted if any of the extant 
 fragments are even as old as Onomacritus ; they are more 
 probably the handiwork of Alexandrine Neo-Platonists, or 
 even of still later authors. As to the motives which prompted 
 them, conjecture alone is possible; probably they did not 
 differ essentially from those of the numerous forgeries of the 
 later philosophical schools, hereafter to be described. The 
 name of Onomacritus appears again in connection with the 
 Homeric poems. He is said, on the dubious authority of 
 Joannes Tsetzes, to have been employed by the Pisistra- 
 tidae as a Diaskeuast. Whatever the functions of a Dia- 
 skeuast may have been, Onomacritus cannot have fulfilled 
 them very satisfactorily, for we learn from an ancient com- 
 mentator that he was suspected of tampering with the sacred 
 text of Homer, as well as with that of Musaeus J. Another 
 Homeric forgery is that ascribed to Pisistratus, or, more 
 usually, to Solon, who is said to have inserted in the Iliad the 
 line which now counts as the 558th of the 2nd book, and 
 which tells how the Salaminian Ajax ranked his ships by the 
 side of the Athenians at Troy. This instance, if true, — and 
 even in Plutarch's time it was disputed, — is especially interest- 
 ing, because the motive of Solon is so manifest. The 
 Athenians and the Megarians were disputing before the 
 Spartans upon their respective claims to Salamis, and the line 
 was produced in order to prove an ancient link between 
 Athens and the neighbouring island state §. Perhaps it is 
 hardly fair to include such works as the Homeric Hymns, the 
 Margites, and other poems of the Epic age, in the list of 
 Homeric forgeries; it may have been only a mistake of 
 later ages which attributed them to the poet of the Iliad. 
 Herodotus lets us know that the authorship of some of these 
 
 * Philoponus in De Aninta, i 5, 15 ; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i. 38. 
 
 ■)■ Suidas, s. v. 'Op(pfvs. Bentley, Phalaris, p. 82 (ed. Wagner, Bell and Son). 
 
 J Jebb, Homer, p. 114 n. Schol. on Od. xi. 604. 
 
 § Plutarch, Solon, ch. x. Arist ; Rhet. i. 15. The Megarians produced a 
 rival version (Strabo, ix. 394). Cp. the similar use of a quotation from 
 Homer in Hdt. vii. 161. 
 
8 
 
 works was a moot point in his day : sceptical critics already 
 inclined to assume that they were not Homer's *. The same 
 historian alludes to another poem, which later writers treated 
 as a forgery, the Arimaspeia of Aristeas t. It is a curious 
 coincidence that the legend attached to the origin of the 
 Septuagint, which tells how it was translated by seventy 
 scribes, and thence derived its name, may be traced to the 
 forged letter of a second Aristeas, who was in the service of 
 the Ptolemies in the third century B.C. The letter is probably 
 the invention of some Alexandrine living a century and 
 a half later. The forgeries which have been mentioned are 
 the most striking of those belonging to strictly classical 
 times. Bentley, in his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, 
 quotes a number of others. Among these, one is noticeable, 
 alike for its ingenuity and for the deliberate malignity which 
 it betokens. It is that of Anaximenes, who composed and 
 published, in the name of his rival Theopompus, bitter 
 invectives against the three chief states of Greece, Athens, 
 Thebes and Sparta, with the result that the unfortunate 
 historian was unable to appear in any part of the peninsula \., 
 This incident recalls some of Defoe's political writings §, and 
 also the Vindication of Natural Society, which Burke com- 
 posed in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, partly as satire, but 
 also, doubtless, with the view of throwing odium on the dead 
 statesman ||. 
 
 Frequent as forgeries were throughout the intenser intel- 
 lectual life of Greece, their golden age was not come until 
 the days of decadence that followed the partition of Alexan- 
 der's Empire. The wealthy libraries of Alexandria and 
 Pergamum afforded an opportunity which was not neglected. 
 Ptolemy Philadelphus and the Attalids were rivals in book- 
 collecting, as well as in dominion ; each was ready to give 
 good sums for volumes inscribed with the name of a famous 
 author, without too careful a scrutiny into the authenticity 
 of the prize. More than one writer alludes to the impulse 
 thus given to the forger's art ^\. There is a valuable passage 
 in David the Armenian, an Aristotelian commentator of the 
 fifth century a.d., of which the gist may be given. He traces 
 the origin of spurious works to five causes. The first is the 
 good feeling (eiyuaitioavvri) of philosophers, which leads them 
 to ascribe their own works to their great masters. Hence, 
 for instance, the name of Pythagoras is attached to the 
 
 * Herodotus, ii. 117 ; iv. 32. f Herodotus, iv. 13-15. 
 
 t Bentley, Phalaris, p. 82 ; Pausanias, vi. 18. 5. 
 § Cp. p. 30. II Morley, Bui-ke, p. 12. 
 
 IT Galen, comm. 2 in Hip. de nai. horn. Ammonius, Comm. in Arist. 
 Cat. p. lo. 
 
writings of the whole Pythagorean school. The second is 
 the greed for lucre which leads men to give a false air of 
 antiquity to books, in order to sell them to great kings who 
 pique themselves on their libraries. Such were Ptolemy, 
 who collected the treatises of Aristotle, and Juba the Libyan, 
 vsrho was a follower of Pythagoras. The third cause is the 
 similarity of names, which leads to confusion ; the fourth, 
 the failure to distinguish between the editor of a selection 
 and the author of the passages contained in it. Finally, the 
 zeal of bibliophiles leads them to forge rare books in order 
 to win credit for the possession of them*. Clearly, David's 
 third and fourth causes do not fall properly into the category 
 of forgeries, and the first two alone need occupy us. It was 
 chiefly imitations of Aristotle that Ptolemy was duped 
 into buying, and this fact makes it very difficult to determine 
 what were the genuine writings of that philosopher. Dio- 
 genes Laertius quotes the titles of 146 works attributed to 
 him, of which very few have descended to us, and which do 
 not include all that we do possess. It is not improbable, 
 as Grote suggests, that Diogenes' authority was Hermippus 
 of Smyrna. Hermippus lived at the end of the third century 
 B. c, and was employed in the Alexandrine library ; so that 
 many of the books in the list were probably forgeries t. It 
 is moreover obvious that any newly discovered treatise of 
 Aristotle purporting to come from an Egyptian source, must 
 be looked on with the greatest suspicion. 
 
 The motive of the impositions practised on Ptolemy is 
 patent and sordid : probably the number of pseudo-Aristo- 
 telian writings was still further swelled by the other practice 
 mentioned by David, which seems to have prevailed in all 
 philosophical schools. A disciple could at the same time 
 pay honour to his philosophical progenitors and gain au- 
 thority for his own-views, by inscribing his treatise with the 
 name of some earlier teacher. It is easy to see how this pro- 
 ceeding may have appeared quite natural and right. The 
 standards of literary propriety that rule in any age are, like 
 all else, relative to that age ; the later philosophers were en- 
 gaged, not in fighting each for his own hand, but in developing 
 the traditional doctrines of a school : after all, what was 
 said was of more importance than who said it, and so long as 
 the new book was written in the common spirit, it was 
 a small matter whether it was attributed to this or that 
 individual. It is only by grasping this point of view that 
 one can avoid bringing the most improbable charges of 
 
 * David Armen., Comm. in Arist. Cat. 28 a. 
 
 + Diog. Laert. v. 21. Val. Rose. Aristoteles Pseudepigraphus. Grote, 
 Aristotle, vol. i. ch is. 
 
10 
 
 wholesale and rather purposeless deceit against entire 
 bodies of respectable thinkers. Even in classical times we 
 find Plato making his master Socrates the mouthpiece of 
 his doctrines, assuredly not from any low motive, but simply 
 from failing to reahse the importance to historical criticism 
 of the distinction between one man's utterances and those of 
 another. In Thucydides we find the germ of another cus- 
 tom which had a similar influence. Just as the historian 
 put imaginary speeches into the mouths of his personages, 
 so, in the lecture-rooms of the later Sophists, compositions 
 modelled on the style and sentiments of famous men formed 
 a favourite rhetorical exercise. Such imitations, if success- 
 ful, might easily be regarded as genuine, and the real author 
 would probably be too much flattered by the error to care 
 about correcting it *. 
 
 After the fall of the Ptolemies, civilization, with forgery 
 at its heels, moved further west. David the Armenian 
 expressly mentions the growth of spurious literature at 
 the court of Juba the Libyan +, and we cannot doubt that 
 Rome was similarly favoured. Indeed, from the first 
 century b. c. onwards, the great wealth of the Romans, 
 their zeal for all forms of Hellenic culture, and their 
 utter want of critical faculty seem to mark them out as 
 the natural prey of the versatile Greek. Even as late as 
 about A.D. 52, the consul Licinius Mucianus was deceived 
 by a letter of the hero Sarpedon, gravely shown to him in 
 a Lycian temple J. Juba appears to have favoured the 
 philosophy of the neo-Pythagoreans, and it is to his life- 
 time, coinciding as that does with the Aufkldrung of the 
 Roman world in the first century, that we must attribute the 
 mass of the spurious Pythagorean literature, the reputed 
 works of Archytas, of Timaeus Locrus, of Ocellus Lucanus. 
 To these Mr. Bywater would add the fragments of Philolaus, 
 which some other critics have surmised to be genuine. The 
 temper of mind in which forgeries find ready acceptance 
 is well illustrated by the genesis of these writings. In the 
 eyes of modern criticism, they are discredited by the manifest 
 plagiarisms from Plato and Aristotle with which they abound. 
 This was exactly what enabled them to pass current when 
 they were first composed. The puny minds of later philoso- 
 phers could not comprehend the greatness of the successors 
 of Socrates. They assumed that, just as they themselves 
 built upon Plato and Aristotle, so Plato and Aristotle must 
 
 " Thuc. i. 22 : Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1890, p. 86. Cf. the declama- 
 tiunculae mentioned in Erasmus, Ep. 1, i. 
 t Op. cit. on p. 8. 
 J Pliny, Nat. Hist. xiii. 13. 
 
II 
 
 have borrowed from others who went before them. Even 
 one of the earliest Peripatetics, Aristoxenus, had asserted 
 that much of the Republic was taken from the treatise of 
 Protagoras On Being*. It was still more natural to exag- 
 gerate Plato's real debt, first pointed out by Aristotle, to 
 Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. In the absence of the 
 historic sense, the really elementary character of Pythagoras' 
 speculations was forgotten, and he became an almost my- 
 thical figure, looming large in the forefront of Greek 
 philosophy. Stoics and Peripatetics alike claimed him as 
 the progenitor of their pecuhar doctrines. Of whom, if not 
 of Pythagoras and his school, could Plato have been the 
 disciple ? Mr. Bywater traces the growth of a legend which 
 finally culminated in the Philolaic forgery. Timon the 
 Pyrrhonist {circ. B.C. 279) is the earliest authority for the 
 statement that Plato founded the Timaeus upon a book which 
 he bought t. Later writers amplify the story: one asserts 
 that Plato was himself a member of a Pythagorean brother- 
 hood and was expelled ; another tells us that the book was 
 by Ocellus Lucanus ; a third ascribes it to Timaeus Locrus ; a 
 fourth even goes so far as to mention the sum paid for it. The 
 final version is given by Hermippus of Smyrna : it relates 
 that the book was by Philolaus and was obtained through 
 a kinsman of hist. Hermippus does not say that it existed 
 in his time ; if it had, it would probably have been in the 
 library at Alexandria, and we should have heard more of it §. 
 In the first century, however, it certainly did exist, for 
 Demetrius Magnes quotes it. Probably therefore this work, 
 from which the existing Philolaic fragments doubtless came, 
 had a merely phantasmal being for at least two centuries, and 
 was at last forged, to prove the truth of the legend II. 
 
 The Epistles of Phalaris are not in themselves particularly 
 remarkable. They belong to a group of frigid rhetorical 
 fabrications, in which the Epistles of Socrates, of Euripides, 
 and, according to most authorities, of Plato, must also be 
 counted. They are famous because they formed the chief 
 subject of contention in the most exciting literary warfare 
 ever waged. The Battle of the Books, in its various aspects 
 of criticism and personality, occupied the attention of men 
 of letters for several brilliant years at the close of the seven- 
 
 * Euseb. P. E. X 3. 24. Diog. Laert. iii. 25. f Aul. Gell. iii. 17. 
 
 J Diog. Laert., viii. 7. § Cp. p. 9. 
 
 II Bywater, Journal of Philology, vol. i. Cp. the forgery of the De Tribus 
 Impostoribus, mentioned on p. 28. Another parallel case is that of the 
 forged letter of Marcus Aurelius quoted as attesting the miracle of the 
 Thundering Legion. See Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, i. 474 ; E. A. Abbott, 
 Philomythus, p. 154. 
 
13 
 
 teenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. It was 
 a tilting-ground on which Temple and Wotton, Bentley and 
 Boyle, Swift and Atterbury all tried their mettle. The 
 humour and refinement of the combatants is astonishing 
 enough, but the solid outcome of the controversy, the masterly 
 dissertation of Bentley, compensates for all. It is a monu- 
 ment of encyclopaedic erudition and acutest reasoning, 
 lavished, as learning and logic too often are, upon a subject 
 hardly worthy of them. Except one Russian savant, no one 
 now believes in the authenticity of the epistles : of their date 
 it can only be said that they were written during the first five 
 centuries of the Christian era. They are mentioned by Stobaeus 
 about 480 A.D.* Nor is the name of their author known; 
 Poliziano attributed them to Lucian, but Bentley had little 
 difficulty in showing that they abounded in mistakes of 
 which Lucian would hardly have been guilty t. 
 
 With Phalaris we may close for a time the record of 
 classical forgeries. The intellectual interest of the period 
 upon which we now enter lies, not in the lingering old age 
 of Hellenic literature, but in the new elements brought by 
 Christianity into the life of the West. It is abundantly 
 evident that there existed in the ante-Nicene church a large 
 mass of apocryphal literature claiming, more or less, the 
 authority of Scripture, but not destined to be ultimately re- 
 garded as inspired. Thus Irenaeus speaks of an aiivBrfTov 
 nXridos dvnKpvcpcav koI vriQav ypa<puiv I : . Epiphanius describes a 
 book relied on by his opponents as an eTTLirKaa-Tov d-ymyipov 
 IT' iriiia §. Some of these writings are preserved to us ; more 
 have perished. They were, roughly, parallel in character to 
 the books of the New Testament as they now stand : there 
 were Gospels, some of them mere variants upon those of 
 the Evangelists, others, the Gospels of the Nativity, covering 
 those earlier years in the life of Christ of which the trust- 
 worthy record is so scanty ; there were collections of Acts, 
 supplementing the Acts of the Apostles ; there were Epistles 
 and other writings ascribed to Apostles or sub-Apostolic 
 Fathers, such as the Epistles of St. Clement or the works 
 of the pseudo-Dionysius, which so profoundly influenced 
 Dean Colet. Of these all may not have been forgeries; 
 many were, perhaps, authentic and only excluded from the 
 canon because they were not believed to be inspired. But 
 the majority were doubtless more or less conscious fabrica- 
 tions, and though it is hardly possible to trace the origin 
 of individual books, yet the general- conditions which explain 
 their composition are fairly evident. They seem to spring 
 
 * Jebb, Lt/e ofBenihy, p. 43. f Bentley, Phalaris, passim. 
 
 % Irenaeus, Haer. i. 20, i. § Epiphanius, Adv. Haer. xxvi. 
 
13 
 
 from two main -motives. Many of them are due to a pious 
 desire to fill up the gaps in the sacred narrative : these are 
 barely to be called forgeries; they were of the nature of 
 romance, not history, rather designed for edification than 
 for record of fact. The writings of the other class are less 
 innocent : they have their rise in the manifold controversies 
 of the Early Church, and were intended to give a false 
 appearance of authority to particular orthodox or heretical 
 doctrines. The Gnostics, the Ebionites, and that curious 
 ascetic body, the Encratites, seem to have been especially 
 addicted to forgery; probably the Gnostics above all, for 
 they were the most Hellenized of the Christian sects, and 
 would naturally carry into religion the old modes of philo- 
 sophical polemics. As a rule, the individual authors of 
 apocryphal books are unknown, but several are ascribed to 
 one Leucius Charinus at the end of the second century. 
 
 It cannot be denied that these forgeries in the most sacred 
 of matters shock the modern moral sense ; there are, however, 
 considerations which must be allowed to modify, if not to 
 dispel our censure. The virtue of intellectual uprightness is 
 regarded to-day as the coping-stone of the ethical life, but 
 this sentiment is one of very recent development ; it was 
 by no means universal in more primitive ages. The 
 assumption underlying the attitude of an early Christian 
 towards matters of evidence was rather this, that the mere 
 formal accuracy of a statement was of infinitely less im- 
 portance than the religious or moral value of its content. 
 The germs of such a view may be easily traced in the 
 antecedents of Christianity. On the one hand the Platonic 
 doctrine of the ' noble lie ' pervaded Greek speculation and 
 passed by inheritance to the Hellenistic sects *. On the 
 other, the influences of Judaism tended in the same direction. 
 In the East, men have never been deeply enamoured of 
 truth for truth's sake ; fact and imagination shade into each 
 other by gentle gradations ; the poet generally gets the 
 better of the historian. And so we find a Jewish Apocrypha, 
 generally taking the form of Apocalypses, which leads natu- 
 rally to that of Christianity, and prepares us to find that a 
 large proportion of the early forgeries had an Oriental origint. 
 
 It cannot be shown that the leaders of the Church 
 encouraged the spread of apocryphal writings. The prin- 
 ciple that the end justifies the means was not openly 
 proclaimed until the coming of the Jesuits. But in the 
 absence of a central authority it was not easy to exercise an 
 
 * Plato, Republic, 382 C, 414 B, 459 D. 
 
 + Cp. E. H. Palmer on the Eastern origin of the Apocryphal books ; 
 /. of Philology, vol. iii. 
 
effective supervision over distant and scattered communities. 
 There is, however, a curious passage in TertulHan's polemic 
 against the ministry of women in churches. His adversaries 
 had quoted against him the spurious Acts of Paul and Thecla, 
 and Tertullian states that a presbyter in Asia had confessed 
 to having forged this book, out of much love for Paul, and 
 had been deposed from his presbytership *. Forgery was 
 adopted also by the enemies of the Christians as a weapon 
 against them. The Acts of Pilate, or at least one version of 
 them, appear to have been composed early in the fourth 
 century by a certain Theotecnus of Antioch, in order to 
 discredit the church in that city. 
 
 In such a state of things, it became imperatively necessary 
 that some canon of the Scriptures should be fixed : this does 
 not seem to have been effected by any one act, but rather by 
 a gradual process of sifting the true from the false. The 
 Muratorian fragment (a. d. 170-180) gives a list of canonical 
 books, which differs in only a few respects from that at present 
 accepted. The modern list dates from the express definition of 
 an African synod atHippo in 393A.D., repeated in 397A.D.in the 
 presence of St. Augustine. The fact that no General Council 
 was ever called upon to decide the question may be taken as 
 showing that all the Churches were practically in accord t. 
 
 After the definition of the canon, the Apocryphal literature 
 becomes of little importance. The interest of Church history 
 soon shifts from points of doctrine to matters of discipline 
 and of temporal dominion. A notable exception is afforded 
 by the creed ascribed to St. Athanasius. As a, confession of 
 faith, its validity depends not on the credit of its author, but 
 on its acceptance by the Church, and it is generally admitted 
 that it cannot have been written by the Father whose name 
 it bears. Indeed, it is only in the eighth century that we 
 find it first called after him. Its theology is Augustinian, 
 and developes the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarna- 
 tion in the most minute detail. Probably it dates from 
 the end of the fifth century. Vincentius of Lerinum, Hilary 
 of Aries, and Vigilius of Thapsus have all been credited with 
 the authorship. If it was by Vigilius, it was only one of 
 several similar fabrications. He was bishop of Thapsus 
 about 484 A.D., and composed several works against the 
 Arian and other heresies, generally under the name of some 
 famous controversialist. Among these were twelve pseudo- 
 
 * Tertullian, De Bapt. 17. 
 
 + Cp. for the whole section on the Apocrypha of the Early Church, West- 
 cott, Canon of the N. T. ; Tischendorf, De Evang. Apocryph. orig. et usu, and 
 When were our Gospels written ? Schaff, History of the Church ; Salmon, 
 Introduction to the study of the New Testament ; Plummer, Church of the Early 
 Fathers. 
 
15 
 
 Athanasian books on the Trinity, dialogues between Athan- 
 asius and Arius, and a tract against the Arian Felician, which 
 he passed off as St. Augustine's. His object appears to have 
 been to attach authority to his writings *. 
 
 Two great ecclesiastical forgeries stand out in the Middle 
 Ages, and claim especial attention because they afford a 
 theoretical basis for the whole power of the Roman see. 
 These are the Donation of Constantine and the pseudo-Isi- 
 dorian Decretals. They must be treated separately, because, 
 though they occur in the same manuscript, they date from 
 different periods and were intended to subserve different 
 ends. The earlier of the two is the Donation of Constantine. It 
 professes to be a deed of gift, by which the great Emperor, 
 in gratitude for his baptism and for the miraculous (fure 
 wrought by Pope Silvester, grants privileges to the clergy, and 
 surrenders to the Pope and his successors jurisdiction in mat- 
 ters of religion and church government, and sovereignty over 
 Rome and Italy. It is necessary to distinguish between the 
 supposed fact of the Donation and the document which asserts 
 it : the former is mentioned in at least the later versions of 
 the Vita Silvestri, contained in the Liber Pontificalis ; the latter 
 not until the later part of the eighth century. The oldest exist- 
 ing text is about seventy years later. Clearly the forgery is 
 Roman in its origin. The Greek form of it is a bad trans- 
 lation, and the object of the whole is to exalt the Roman 
 clergy and the bishop of Rome. There is no reason to 
 suppose that it even records an historic event. Dr. Dollinger 
 thinks it likely that it had its origin somewhere between 753 
 and 777 A. D., at a time when the turbulence of the Lombards 
 in the north and the dpubtful friendship of the Byzantine 
 rulers in the east may have suggested to Pope Gregory 1 1 
 the desirability of attempting to establish an independent 
 temporal power. During the Middle Ages the Donation was 
 thoroughly believed in, although the Emperor Otho appears 
 to have recognised its spurious character as early as 999 a.d. 
 It suited the temper of a time which accepted cataclysms and 
 ignored development, and could not conceive how the Church 
 could ever have grown rich and powerful, unless it were 
 through some single act of princely generosity. In the eyes 
 of reformers, who found in the wealth of the papacy the cause 
 of all its shortcomings, the act of Constantine was the begin- 
 ning of the Church's woes. Dante mourns over it in more 
 than one passage t : — 
 
 * Schaff, Hist, of Post-Nicene Church, ii. 695. Biographie Umverselle, s. v. 
 Vigilius. The Creed may date only from the 8th century and the influence 
 of Charlemagne in the Church. Cp. Ffoulkes, Divisions of Christendom. 
 f Inf. xix. 115-117 : cp. Par. xx. 55 ; De Monarchia, ii. 
 
i6 
 
 ' Ahi Constantin ! di quanto mal fu matre, 
 Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote, 
 Che da te prese il prime ricco patre.' 
 
 The fraud was exposed in the fifteenth century, mainly 
 through the efforts of Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla, 
 and the facts are now admitted alike by Protestant and 
 Catholic controversialists *. 
 
 The pseudo-Isidorian Decretals appeared about the middle 
 of the ninth century. A decretal is an authoritative -answer 
 given by the Pope in reply to some question on matters of 
 doctrine, discipline or ritual. Such deliverances had been 
 gathered together from early times, and there was a famous 
 Spanish collection of the fourth century. The forgery also 
 bore the name of a Spaniard, Isidore of Seville, who died in 
 636 A.D. It contained, besides some authentic documents, 
 the Donation of Constantine, and a number of others either 
 spurious or interpolated. They extended from the papacy of 
 St. Clement in the first century to that of Gregory in the 
 eighth, and covered the whole ground of orthodox behaviour 
 and belief Their genuineness was first impugned by 
 Nicholas of Cusa, and was afterwards made the subject of an 
 attack by Calvin. The object of the writer must have been 
 at once to protect the clergy from the secular power and to 
 preserve them from moral decay ; he favours the interests of 
 the bishops, rather than that of the Pope. He has been 
 supposed to be Benedictus Levita of Mayence : all that it is 
 safe to assert is that the work was probably done by some 
 Frankish ecclesiastic or ecclesiastics, shortly before it was- 
 made public t. 
 
 The remaining forgeries of the Middle Ages resemble in 
 character those already discussed. They are generally of 
 monkish origin, and designed to secure dignities or posses- 
 sions to some religious community. Since the monks were 
 the sole possessors of sufficient learning to read parchments, 
 they were able to manipulate them as they pleased, without 
 much fear of detection. Thus the inmates of Durham 
 Priory, when summoned to Rome in the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century for the decision of the disputes between 
 them and Bishop de Marisco, were able to produce an 
 elaborate series of documents in support of their claims. 
 These professed to date from the foundation of the priory in 
 J093> but to the eye of the modern historian they are ap- 
 parent forgeries, fabricated for the purposes of the trial %. 
 
 * Dallinger, Fables respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages. Schaff, Hist, 
 of the Med. Church. 
 
 + Schaff, Hist, of the Med. Church, i. 267. 
 
 X Greenwell, Feodatium Prioratus Dunelmensis ^Surtees Society). H. G. 
 Hewlett, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891. 
 
17 
 
 The unlimited leisure which the monks enjoyed gave them 
 every opportunity for the composition of diligent and detailed 
 frauds. This characteristic of the religious life led also to 
 the beginnings of the vast mediaeval chronicle-literature. 
 Some preliminary falsification of foundation-charters may 
 have been already necessary, before the stricter monastic 
 rule could be stretched to sanction such an undertaking. 
 Browning speaks of Chronicles 
 
 • commenced when some old monk 
 Found it intolerable to be sunk 
 (Vexed to the quick by his revolting cell) 
 Quite out of summer when alive and well : 
 Ended when by his mat the Prior stood, 
 'Mid busy promptings of the brotherhood, 
 Striving to coax from his decrepit brains 
 The reason Father Porphyry took pains 
 To blot those ten lines out which used to stand 
 First on their charter drawn by Hildebrand.' 
 
 Many of the Chronicles are veracious enough and inspired 
 by more of the historic sense than could be expected from 
 the age ; here and there one is found whose contents are 
 plagiarised or purely fictitious. The History of Croyland 
 Abbey is a typical specimen : it bears the name of In- 
 gulphus, who was Abbot up to 1109 a.d. It is really 
 a compilation from Ordericus Vitalis, Florence of Worcester 
 and others, and serves to introduce a number of charters, 
 which are of suspicious authenticity. The date of it is at 
 least a century after that of Ingulphus, and Professor Morley 
 puts it as late as 1415*- The famous French Chronicle of 
 Turpin is not even a plagiarism ; ' most of it is a romance, 
 a mere Latin prose version of the Chanson de Roland. It 
 falls into two parts. The first five chapters describe a pil- 
 grimage of Charlemagne to Compostella, and are clearly 
 intended to magnify the shrine of St. James. They are 
 written in the third person, and make no pretence to be 
 by Turpin. The remaining twenty-seven chapters are by 
 another hand, written in the first person, as if they were 
 the veritable narrative of Turpin. St. Denys is more promi- 
 nent than St. James, and there are plain indications that the 
 author was connected with Vienne. Turpin, or Tilpin, was 
 an historical personage in the days of Charlemagne ; he was 
 archbishop of Rheims from 753 to 794 a.d. Neither part of 
 the Chronicle can be by him : the first belongs to the end of 
 
 * Materials for Eng. Hist. (Rolls Series), vol. i. Morley, English Writers, 
 iii. 24. H. G. Hewlett, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891. The most audacious 
 mediaeval forgers were the monks of Glastonbury, who ascribed the Liber 
 Cradalis (circ. 1150) to Christ himself. Cp. Paulin Paris, in Romania, vol. i. 
 
 B 
 
i8 
 
 the eleventh century, the second to the beginning of _ the 
 twelfth. The origin of the larger fragment, which is chiefly 
 filled with the legendary exploits of Charlemagne's paladins, 
 must be found in some event which brought Vienne and 
 Compostella into relations with each other. This is afforded 
 by the life of Gui de Bourgogne, who was archbishop of 
 Vienne until 1119, made a visit to Compostella in 1108, and 
 afterwards became Pope under the name of Calixtus II. It 
 is not by any means necessary to suppose that the Pope 
 himself condescended to the forgery. There is indeed a bull 
 of Calixtus extant in which allusion is made to the Chronicle, 
 but this, we are assured by M. Ldon Gautier, is itself 
 spurious. It seems a plausible theory that a monk of Vienne 
 accompanied the archbishop to Compostella, found there the 
 earlier chapters, and attached to them his imaginative sequel*. 
 
 Passing from the Charlemagne' cycle of romances to that 
 of the Table Round, we come upon the Historta Regum 
 Britanniae composed by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The nature 
 of Geoffrey's work is somewhat uncertain ; it is hard to say 
 whether he is or is not to be credited with a literary fraud. 
 His own account is that he drew his material from a book 
 which Walter Calenius, archdeacon of Oxford, brought from 
 Brittany. Various attempts have been made to identify this 
 book ; some have believed it to be only the ninth-century 
 Historia Britonum of the pseudo-Nennius ; but it is very 
 probable that it never existed at all, and that the Historia 
 Regum Britanniae was compiled from Welsh traditions and 
 embellished by the fertile fancy of the author. Geoffrey's 
 work was completed by 1147 a.d., and had some influence 
 upon at least the later forms of the Round Table romances t. 
 
 The last group of fabrications serves to illustrate how 
 closely the literary forger has always followed in the wake 
 of the chief intellectual interests of his age. So long as the 
 struggle between the Church and the temporal power lasted, 
 his energies were expended upon providing documentary 
 evidence for ecclesiastical claims : when the strictly mediaeval 
 forms of literature, the chronicle and the romance, began to 
 develope, these too provided new spheres for his activity. 
 And in the same way, as the Renaissance draws near, with 
 
 * Gaston Paris, de Pseudo- Turpino. Leon Gautier, Les Epopees Franfaises, 
 vol. i. ch. 15. yiorley, English Writers, vi. 66. Saintshury , Hist, of French 
 Lit. p. 127. 
 
 t Morley, English Writers, iii. 44. Paulin Paris, Romans dela Table Ronde, 
 introd. Gaston Paris in Hist. Litt. de France, vol. xxx ; Manuel d'Ancien 
 Franfais ; Huth Merlin, introd.; Romania, 'xa\. pp. 371-374. La Borderie, 
 V Historia Britonum et I' Historia Britannica. Aubertin, Hist, de la Langue et 
 de la Litt, Franfaises, 
 
i9 
 
 the. widening of the mental horizon the scope of the forger 
 is also widened. In England the promise of the Renaissance 
 was first shown at the close of the fourteenth century, only 
 to be cut off for another hundred years by the French wars 
 and the wars of the Roses. Two curious frauds mark this 
 period; one is the monkish interpolation of Chaucer's 
 Parson's Tale, already described, the other the so-called 
 Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville. The author 
 of this entertaining book states that he left England in 1322, 
 that for thirty-six years he travelled in all parts of the earth, 
 Tartary, Persia, Chaldaea, the Holy Land, Ethiopia and 
 India, and that, finally, in 1356, being forced to return home 
 by the rheumatic gout, he wrote an account of his wanderings, 
 first in Latin, then in French and in Enghsh. The book is 
 full of extraordinary views on natural history, and of travel- 
 lers' tales after the fashion of Herodotus. Modern criticism 
 denies that it is a record of actual journeyings ; it is in 
 reality an elaborate and ingenious cento of passages taken 
 from a number of earlier itineraries, among which those of 
 William of Boldensele, Jaques a Vitry and Odericus of 
 Friuli are the chief It is also greatly indebted to the 
 Legenda Aurea of Jacobus a Voragine. There is no reason 
 to suppose that the writer ever left the shores of Europe. 
 Moreover he could not have written the English version 
 himself; that is a later and often faulty translation from a 
 French original. His name remains at present a mystery: 
 to that of Maundeville he probably had no right. There are 
 certain allusions in the works of one Jean d'Outremeuse, 
 a chronicler of Liege, which may some day throw light on 
 the matter. We are informed that there was a certain 
 physician at Liege called Jean de Bourgoyne, or John with 
 the Beard. This man, being forced to leave England in 
 1343 for the murder of an earl, bound himself to travel over 
 three parts of the world, but never got further than Liege. 
 On his deathbed he made the chronicler his confidant, and 
 claimed to be Sir John Maundeville, Earl of Montfort. It 
 may be remarked, in the first place, that these titles are 
 unknown to heralds ; in the second, that John with the 
 Beard is mentioned in the Voiage and Travaile, and is said 
 to have urged Maundeville to write ; in the third, that there 
 was a John de Maundeville banished for the murder of 
 Gaveston in 1312 and pardoned in the next year ; there was 
 also a Jean de Bourgoyne banished in 1321 for an attack 
 on the Despensers. There has evidently been some lying 
 somewhere, and it is next to impossible to discover the truth 
 now; but it is hard not to suspect that Jean d'Outremeuse 
 himself had a hand in the fraud, especially when we find 
 
 B 2 
 
20 
 
 that he used some of Maundeville's material over again in 
 his Myreur des Histoires*. 
 
 In the fifteenth century, after a long interval, men began 
 once again to forge, as they had already begun to read, the 
 classics. The fables written about 1327 by Planudes Maxi- 
 mus, 'that idiot of a monk,' as Bentley calls him, and passed 
 off as Aesop's, form a link between the Renaissance and the 
 Roman age, in which another ' parcel ' of pseudo-Aesopic 
 fables had already been written by Babriust. It does not 
 appear that the invention of printing made things much 
 easier for the forger. He might very well publish a sham 
 antique and trust to the loose scholarship of an uncritical 
 age to save him from the necessity of producing the' original ; 
 but then there had never been much difficulty in putting off 
 inquisitive friends with a written transcript upon some plea 
 or another. Such a course would now awaken suspicion at 
 once, but our ancestors were far more confiding. 
 
 The most notable forgery of the Renaissance was that of 
 Jean Nanni, or Annius, of Viterbo. Annius was a consider- 
 able scholar, learned in Latin, Greek and Hebrew; he held 
 an official position in the household of Alexander VI, and, in 
 that lax court, enjoyed a somewhat austere moral reputation. 
 There is indeed a story that he was poisoned by the Pope's 
 'nephew,' Caesar Borgia, for weariness of his exhortations to 
 virtue. The character of his Antiquitatum variarumvolumina 
 xvii, published in 1498, is therefore the more surprising. It 
 contained works, until that time unknown, of Berosus, Fabius 
 Pictor, Myrsilus, Manetho, Sempronius, Archilochus, Cato 
 and Megasthenes. The originals were said by Annius to 
 have been found in a journey to Mantua, but there is no 
 doubt that the books are spurious, and very little that Annius 
 wrote them himself. This was the view of Agostini and of 
 Isaac Casaubon, but it was by no means invariably accepted 
 at the time. On the contrary, the fragments went through 
 many editions and found learned defenders J. One of these 
 was Charles Sigonio of Modena, but then Sigonio was a 
 kindred spirit. Chancing to light upon a fragment of Cicero's 
 book De Consolattone, he was struck with the idea of com- 
 pleting it and passing off the whole as genuine. The frgjid 
 
 * Warner, ed. of Maundeville (Roxburghe Club). Morley, English 
 Writers^ iv. 279, 
 
 •)• Bentley, Phalaris, pp. 269, sqq. Since Bentley wrote, a number of 
 fables by Babrius have been found, in 1840, at a monastery on Mt. Athos. 
 The discoverer, Minoides Menas, added some of his own, which were 
 edited by G. C. Lewis. Cf Rutherford, Babrius, introd. 
 
 t Biographic Universelle, s. v. Annius. I. Disraeli, Cur. of Lit. vol. vi. 
 Hallam, Lit. of Eur. i. 3, 241. 
 
ai 
 
 was discovered by his pupil Riccoboni, but Sigonio per- 
 sistently denied it, and so Ciceronian was his Latinity that 
 he was able to convince the learned world. Nearly three 
 centuries later, the discovery at Modena of some of Sigonio's 
 correspondence revealed the truth*. The forgeries of Nanni 
 and Sigonio in Italy were paralleled in 1529, in Spain, by those 
 of a high church dignitary, Antoine Guevara, archbishop of 
 Montenedo. Guevara, who is known as historicus mendacissi- 
 mus,_ fabricated a number of letters of Marcus Aurelius and 
 published them in the so-called Golden Book {Libro aureo 
 de Marco Aurelio emperador). This book is important in the 
 history of literature, through the ornate and affected style {alto 
 estilo) of the author. It was translated into English by 
 Lord Berners, and, again, as The Dial of Princes, by 
 Sir Thomas North, and became the parent of the fashion- 
 able 'Euphuism' of John Lylyt. It is an amusing fact 
 that Rabelais in his early days was the victim of a 
 forgery. -He published in 1582 two legal documents which 
 he believed to be genuine relics of Roman antiquity, but 
 which were really due to the humour of two contemporaries, 
 Pomponius Laetus and Jovienus PontanusJ. But greater 
 • scholars than Rabelais have been beguiled ; for Bentley 
 records how Muretus imposed upon Scaliger with some 
 Latin verses of his own.§ It has been held that we ought to 
 add to the list of Renaissance forgeries the first six books of 
 Tacitus' Annals. The history of these is a little mysterious. 
 There is an apparent reference to them in the writings of 
 Ruodolphus of Fulda, a monk of the ninth century. From 
 that time they are never mentioned or quoted until 1425, 
 when Poggio Bracciolini speaks of some unknown works of 
 Tacitus said to be preserved at Hersfeld, near Fulda. In 1509, 
 they were brought to Rome by one of the Medici, and soon 
 afterwards published. Some dozen years ago, a theory was 
 started that they are an ingenious forgery, due to Poggio 
 Bracciolini himself. It is, however, dismissed by Mr. 
 Fur'neaux, in his edition of the Annals, as hardly deserving 
 . of discussion ||. 
 
 In England, there is little to record before the seventeenth 
 century. There are the Casket Letters, those love-effusions 
 in verse and prose said to have been written by Mary Queen 
 
 * Biographie Universelle, s. v. Sigonius. Hallam, Lit. of Eur. ii. i, 508. 
 
 ■|- Biographie Universelle, s. v. Guevara. Landmann, Shakespeare and Eu- 
 phuism (New Sh. Soc. Transactions, 1880-85). Hallam, Lit. of Eur. i. 7, 397. 
 
 J Lang, Books and Bookmen. Biog. Univ., s. v. Rabelais. 
 
 § Bentley, Phalaris, p. 82. Boxhornius also was deceived by a poem of 
 Michel de I'Hdpital, De Lite, and Wolfius by an Aesopic fable of Pfere 
 Commire's. 
 
 II Furneaux, Tacitus Ann. i-vi. pp.. 5, 7. 
 
22 
 
 of Scots to Bothwell, and produced by Moray, in a ' silver box 
 oergilt with gold,' as the most damning count in the indict- 
 ment against his sister and sovereign. The real character of 
 these letters is one of the many mysteries which veil our 
 vision of the ' tragic Mary.' Were they indeed what they 
 professed to be ? or were they, as has been rather boldly 
 suggested, written originally to Darnley and then inter- 
 polated ? or must we set them down as a black forgery of 
 Morton and his henchman Buchanan, who served Mary for 
 a while, and then wrote the infamous Detectio ? Historians 
 seem unable to agree. Mr. Froude thinks them genuine; 
 Professor Creighton, and Mr. Skelton, the biographer of 
 Maitland of Lethington, who has gone carefully into the 
 evidence, do not. It need only be here said that, if they are 
 a forgery, the infamy of the motive from which they spring 
 must put all others to the blush*. 
 
 Considerable difficulty has been caused to historians of 
 liteiature by what may be called the Shakespeare-apocrypha. 
 The mere fact that a play is entered as Shakespeare's in the 
 Stationers' register, or that it bears his name or initials upon 
 the title-page, is by no means sufficient evidence that it is 
 in any reasonable sense his work. It was by no means 
 every dramatist whose effusions would pay for the printing, 
 and Elizabethan publishers were not above making use 
 of Shakespeare's acknowledged reputation to imp out that of 
 meaner men. Thus for a period of nearly eighty years, up to 
 as late as 1660, we constantly find plays ascribed to the 
 master-dramatist which he cannot possibly have written. Of 
 course a distinction must be made ; the latest of these plays, 
 the King Stephen or the Iphis and lanthe of the Restoration, 
 he cannot even have seen : of the earlier ones a fair propor- 
 tion were produced by the King's Players, and in these he 
 may have had a hand. The result is that no external criterion 
 can be set up to distinguish between Shakespeare's own work 
 and that of his fellows. The selection made by Heminge and 
 Condell for the 1623 folio is not sufficient : probably Shake- 
 speare did no more for Pericles and Henry VIII, which are in 
 that, than he did for Edward III, which is not. The subject 
 serves exceedingly well to illustrate the loose ideas of literary 
 property which have prevailed during most ages of the world's 
 history t. 
 
 Shakespeare's fame has- never paled, and therefore he has 
 
 * Froude, i^fw/. o/i'K^. ix. 396. Creishton, Age of Elizabeth, p. ^S. Skelton, 
 Maitland of Lethington, vol. ii. 
 
 t Fleay, Life and Work of Shakespeare. Avhev.Stationers Registers : &c. 
 The Passionate Pilgrim was for long accepted as Shakespeare's through the 
 fraud of Jaggard, a piratical publisher. 
 
23 
 
 always been from time to time the victim of the literary 
 forger. In the last century W. H. Ireland, in this Mr. J. 
 Payne Collier, have been those who have injured him most ; 
 now that he is in question, we may consider them here, in 
 spite of the claims of chronological order. It was in 1796 
 that Samuel Ireland, a rather insigniiicant literary man, first 
 began to exhibit at his house a number of Shakespearean 
 relics. These were interesting and varied, and included a 
 letter from the poet to Anne Hathaway, inclosing a lock of 
 his hair, a letter from Queen Elizabeth, a profession of faith, 
 a catalogue of Shakespeare's library, a deed of gift to an 
 ancestor of Ireland's own for saving him from drowning, and 
 another deed appointing Heminge and Condell trustees of 
 his literary property. The account given of the documents 
 was that they had been obtained by Ireland's son, a 
 solicitor's clerk, from a gentleman who wished to remain 
 unknown. It then turned out that there existed in the same 
 hands two forgotten plays of Shakespeare, Vortigern and 
 Rowena and Henry II. Popular excitement was aroused ; 
 Sheridan came forward and offered to produce Vortigern and 
 Rowena on the stage. This he did, and the play was 
 damned amid the laughter of the pit. Then the whole 
 secret came out. Suspicions had already been aroused as to 
 the genuineness of the documents. Malone, the eminent 
 critic, published an elaborate inquiry, in which he attempted 
 to demonstrate their falsity. Before the end of the year his 
 attitude was justified. William Henry Ireland published an 
 Authentic Account of the transaction, in which he asserted 
 that the ' literary gentleman ' was a myth, and that he him- 
 self had written both papers and plays, inspired thereto by 
 his father's enthusiasm for everything connected with the 
 poet. Some years afterwards he repeated his version of the 
 facts at great detail in a volume of Confessions. It is not 
 quite certain, however, that it is the true one. Samuel 
 Ireland disclaimed all knowledge of his son's conduct, but 
 Dr. C. M. Ingleby believes that he was the prime mover in 
 the fraud, and that the whole of the Ireland household was 
 occupied in carrying out his design. The same writer states 
 that, even when the truth was discovered, so many people 
 wished to have a specimen of the imitations that Ireland was 
 able to turn his talent to still further account by forging 
 duplicates^ of his own forgeries *. 
 
 The case of John Payne Collier is a very strange one. 
 Few men have done more good work than he in reviving 
 
 * Malone, Inquiry into Shakespeare Papers. Chalmers, Apology for the Be- 
 lievers. 'Lz.-a^, Books and Bookmen. IngXehy.Shakespeme Fabrications. The story 
 of Ireland forms the subject of Mr. James Payn's novel, The Talk of the Town. 
 
■24 
 
 the literature of the poet ; he* was foremost among the con- 
 tributors to both the Shakespeare and the Percy Societies. 
 But some strange freak of temperament inspired him with 
 the desire to forge, and he forged liberally and unblushingly. 
 Curiously enough, at the very beginning of his career, he 
 was imprisoned and reprimanded by the House of Commons 
 for falsifying the report of a debate. Shortly after this he 
 turned to literature, and became librarian to the Duke of 
 Devonshire. It is impossible to give a list of all the 
 forgeries by which his History of English Dramatic Poetry, 
 his Memoirs of Alleyn, and several minor works are dis- 
 figured. He seems to have freely falsified documents in 
 Bridgewater House, in Dulwich College Library, even in the 
 State Paper Office and the British Museum. His opus _ 
 magnum was the famous Perkins Folio. Already in 1842 
 he had issued a first edition of Shakespeare, enriched by 
 the emendations made by a seventeenth-century hand on 
 the margin of the Duke of Devonshire's copy of the 1623 
 folio. In the light of what happened afterwards, we may 
 fairly mistrust these emendations. In 1852, Collier an- 
 nounced that some three years before he had purchased a 
 copy of the second folio Shakespeare of 1632, and that he 
 now found that the margins of this were full of corrections of 
 the text. The book bore the name of Thomas Perkins, and 
 to this early owner, whom he believed to have been almost 
 a contemporary of the poet, Collier ascribed the corrections. 
 It is unnecessary to go minutely into the controversy which 
 raged around the Perkins Folio and the volume of lectures 
 by Coleridge on Shakespeare and Milton, published by 
 Collier in 1856 from notes taken at the time when they were 
 given. The lectures are open to suspicion : the marginalia 
 on the folio have been proved to be forgeries. In 1859 the 
 book was submitted to critical inspection, and it became 
 apparent that, besides the ink-marks of the ' old corrector,' 
 there existed traces of pencil-marks in a modern hand. 
 By aid of a powerful microscope it was proved further that 
 in many cases the pencil-marks underlay the ink-marks, 
 which could not therefore be of any antiquity. The results 
 of these investigations were published by Mr. Hamilton, of 
 the British Museum, and proved unanswerable. It was 
 still an open question whether Collier was himself the 
 forger or merely a dupe. This was cleared up after his 
 death. Among his papers was found a transcript of one of 
 the interpolated Dulwich records, in which the interpola- 
 tions had been neatly filled in in Collier's own hand *- 
 
 * Collier's publications, passim. Stephen, Did. of Nat. Biog. s. v. Collier. 
 Jngleby, Shakespeare Fabrications and Complete View, &c. Hamilton, Inquiry. 
 
25 
 
 The only other Shakespeare forger who deserves men- 
 tion is George Steevens, 'the Puck of commentators,' as 
 Gifford calls him. Steevens was a bitter rival of Malone, 
 and used to amuse himself by inventing imaginary facts 
 about Shakespeare and communicating them under pseu- 
 donyms to some journal which Malone was sure to see. 
 If he was led to quote them, Steevens would gravely correct 
 the error over his own signature. Isaac Disraeli states that 
 it is to the invention of Steevens that we owe the marvellous 
 story of the deadly Upas-tree of Java*. 
 
 The seventeenth century affords one great forgery, that of 
 the Eikon Basilike, and several small ones. The early his- 
 tory of Spain was manipulated by the Jesuit, Jerome de 
 Higuerra. In his regret that the events which accompanied 
 the conversion of that country to Christianity had not been 
 more fully recorded, he was led to cite Flavius Dexter as an 
 authority on the subject. Now Flavius Dexter was a writer 
 of the first half of the fourth century, and he is quoted by 
 Saint Jerome, but his works have perished. This fact was a 
 difficulty in Higuerra's way, but it was got over by the aid of 
 his fellow-Jesuit Torialba, who succeeded in producing a 
 satisfactory but, unfortunately, spurious manuscript. This 
 he said he had found at the monastery of Fulda, and it was 
 given to the world in 1619. A somewhat similar case was 
 that of the Frenchman Antoine Varillas, who wrote a History 
 of Heresies, in which he made free use of purely imaginary 
 authorities ; the fraud was discovered, but none the less 
 Varillas died' in 1596 in the odour of sanctity. ' Si la 
 reputation de Varillas,' says M. Vigneut-Marville, 'a bronchi 
 .du cote des lettres, elle est demeur^e ferme du cote de la 
 pidte et de la vertu. C'^tait un philosophe chrdtient.' 
 One cannot help contrasting this story with that of M. 
 Daudet's Academician, the elder Astier, who spent a life- 
 time in the study of history, who was once alluded to by 
 Mommsen, in a note, as ineptissimus vir, and who finally 
 committed suicide when he discovered that he had been for 
 years the dupe of a cunning forger J. The tradition of 
 Annius and Sigonius is continued in this century by Curzio 
 Inghirami, who wrote a number of Etruscan fragments and 
 said he had dug them up in a field. This was in 1637, 
 at Volterra. When the field was examined, a fresh supply 
 of fragments was found, together with part of a chronicle 
 by Prosper Fesulanus, a Roman officer, dating from about 
 
 * I. Disraeli, Cur. of Lit. vol. vi. 
 
 t Biog. Univ. s. V. Varillas. I. Disraeli, Curiosities. 
 
 % A. Daiidet, Vlmmortel. 
 
26 
 
 6o B. c* In 1663 a genuine fragment of Petronius wa 
 found at Trau in Dalmatia ; this was speedily followed by a 
 forged one published by Nodot in 1694 as the discovery of 
 an officer at Belgrade. A third was fabricated in 1800 by 
 Marchena, who pretended to have come upon an unknown 
 manuscript at Saint-Gall. 
 
 The Eikon Basilike, like the Casket Letters, is memorable 
 for its intimate association with one of the tragedies of his- 
 tory. The examination of the printer, Royston, before the 
 Council of State, shows that it was originally intended 
 to issue it, under the title of Suspiria Regalia, or The King's 
 Plea, during the trial of Charles I, in the hope of influencing 
 public opinion in his favour. It must have been carefully 
 designed to this end. The body of the book consists in a 
 retrospect, apparently by the king's own hand, of the events 
 since the calling of his last Parliament. It deals in a spirit 
 half of vindication, half of apology, with the more dubious 
 parts of his policy, such as the sacrifice of Strafford. 
 Inserted at intervals are appropriate prayers and religious 
 musings, while other prayers, together with a somewhat 
 pathetic letter to his son, written in the presence of imminent 
 death, form a sort of appendix. The printer was not ready 
 in time, and the book did not appear until Feb. 9th, 1649, 
 ten days after the execution of Charles. Viewed apart from 
 the circumstances of its production, the literary value of the 
 book is small ; it is composed in a style of second-rate 
 rhetoric : but it was received with favour by the royalists. 
 Forty-seven editions appeared in the course of 1649, and the 
 efforts of the Government to suppress it were ineffectual. 
 Clarendon, writing in April to a friend of the queen, praises 
 it as an ' immortal monument of his intense affection to and 
 value of her Majesty.' Sir E. Nicholas calls it 'the most 
 exquisite pious and princely piece ever written.' We could 
 scarcely expect criticism from such readers. On the repub- 
 lican side, it was not long before doubts of the royal author- 
 ship were plainly hinted, and, in August, a pamphlet called 
 the Eikon Alethine boldly suggested that it was written by a 
 prelate. This contains a frontispiece in which the king is shown 
 writing at a table, while a divine dictates to him from behind 
 a curtain. These accusations were promptly answered in 
 The Princely Pelican. As the best way of neutralising the 
 effect of the Eikon, Milton had undertaken to write a 
 counter-blast. This, the Eikonoclastes, appeared on Oct. 6. 
 It was Milton's primary object to refute the theory of the 
 king's character and actions put forward in the Eikon 
 Basilike ; therefore he hardly touches upon the question of 
 
 * Biog. Univ. a. v. Inghirami. I. Disraeli, Curiosities. 
 
37 
 
 its authenticity, except in stray phrases aimed at the ' secret 
 coadjutor' and 'household rhetorician,' and in a doubt 
 whether the style was Charles's. The most famous passage 
 in the pamphlet is that in which Milton points out that one 
 of the appended prayers is a plagiarism from Sidney, 
 'stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen 
 woman praying to a heathen god ; and that in no serious 
 book, but in the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip 
 Sidney's Arcadia.' The point is noteworthy, because the 
 prayer of Pamela is not found in every edition of the Eikon, 
 and certain. royalists asserted that it was interpolated by 
 Milton himself. This is incredible, but Dr. Johnson seems 
 to have credited it. 
 
 The secret of the real authorship of the Eikon Basilike is 
 revealed by the correspondence of a certain Dr. Gauden, ' a 
 churchman,' says Pattison, 'whom his friends might call 
 liberal, and his enemies timeserving.' Gauden had been re- 
 warded by the Parliament for an attack on the policy of 
 Laud ; he had afterwards adopted the royalist cause, and, 
 during the Commonwealth, had again turned his coat and 
 signed the Covenant. The claims of such a record upon the 
 court party could not be great, but, upon the Restoration in 
 1660, Gauden received tlie bishopric of Exeter. With this 
 he was not content, and, in the course of the next year he 
 began to write to Clarendon, the Chancellor, and Nicholas, 
 the Secretary of State, dwelling upon his services to the late 
 king and demanding further recompense. His early letters 
 are filled with hints of some extraordinary ' service and 
 merit,' and with veiled threats to apply personally to 
 Charles II. Presently he becomes more explicit. On 
 Jan. 21, 1661, he definitely claims to have written the Eikon ; 
 'this book and figure was wholly and only my invention, 
 making and designe.' He asserts further that it was conveyed 
 to the king in the Isle of Wight by the Duke of Somerset and 
 Dr. Duppa, bishop of Winchester, that Charles II knew 
 of the fact through the Duke of York, and that Dr. Morley, 
 bishop of Worcester, had imparted the 'arcanum' to 
 Clarendon himself. Upon March 13, the Lord Chancellor 
 replies to Gauden for the first time. In his letter occurs the 
 following passage : ' The particular which you often re- 
 newed, I do confesse was imparted to me under secrecy, and 
 of which I did not take myself to be at liberty to take 
 notice ; and truly when it ceases to be a secret I know 
 nobody will be gladd of it but Mr. Milton ; I have very 
 often wished I had never been trusted with it.' There 
 the correspondence stops, but in March, 1662, Gauden was 
 addressed as the author of the Eikon by the Earl of Bristol, 
 
•28 
 
 and in the same month he further asserted that Dr. Sheldon, 
 bishop of London, was aware of the truth. In May he 
 was translated to the see of Worcester. There can be no 
 doubt that Gauden's story is the true one. The proof of 
 it rests, not upon his own statement, but upon the attitude 
 of Clarendon. The inference from the following facts is 
 overwhelming. Clarendon practically admits the truth of 
 Gauden's assertion in his letter. Morley, Duppa, and 
 Sheldon were still alive, and could have been at once ap- 
 pealed to, to deny it if it were false. Gauden, a very 
 lukewarm Episcopalian, was promoted successively to two 
 rich benefices. Finally, Clarendon makes no allusion to the 
 Eikon in his history. Clearly, he believed Gauden, and, 
 clearly, he had every means of finding out the truth. 
 There is the further evidence of Gauden's wife and his 
 curate. Walker, who both confirmed his account after his 
 death. Walker stated further that Duppa himself had 
 written two chapters of the book. Those who defend- the 
 royal authorship have a most flimsy case ; they are driven 
 to rely chiefly upon stories of the manuscript having been 
 seen among the king's papers at an early period. Some of 
 these can however be definitely traced to misconceptions. It is 
 not surprising that the partisans of Charles are persistent in 
 their belief in the Eikon ; the truth goes far to shatter certain 
 illusions about the ' royal martyr;' which for the most part 
 have their source in it. It has often been ■ made evident 
 that any forgery is bound to succeed, whatever the critics may 
 say, which can appeal to prejudice or passion *. 
 
 The Protestant sectaries, like the Gnostic heretics, cannot 
 be acquitted of attempting to prop up their doctrines by 
 forgery. The London printers were ready enough to accom- 
 modate them. Texts were omitted altogether or sufficiently 
 perverted to bear the desired interpretation. The most 
 famous instance is afforded by the Pearl Bible, printed by 
 one Field in 1653. In the authorised version. Acts vi. 3 
 runs as follows — 'Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among 
 you seven men of honest report, full of the holy Ghost and 
 wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.' In the 
 Pearl Bible, 'ye ' takes the place of 'we.' This may of course 
 be a mere misprint — there were 6,000 errata in one Bible 
 of the day ; but there is some plausibility in the story that 
 Field received £1,500 from the Independents to make the 
 change, in order that the text might appear to sanction the 
 appointment of ministers by the congregation t. ■ 
 
 A truly vexed question in bibliography is the history of 
 
 * M-asson, Life of Milton. Pattison, Life of Milion. Symonis, Life of Sidney. 
 Ed. Reviezv, xliv. t I. Disraeli, Curiosities of Lit. vol. vi. 
 
29 
 
 that very rare tract, the De Tribus Impostortbus. It is 
 probably a close parallel to that of the fragments of Philo- 
 laus. About the beginning of the century, vague rumours of 
 a book of that name, ' vrai chef-d'oeuvre d'impi^t^,' begin to 
 make themselves heard. The Carmelite Geronymo de la 
 Madre de Dios says, in 1611, that it impugned Moses, Christ, 
 and Mahomet, and had been printed in Germany in the year 
 before. He does not seem to have seen the book himself, 
 and, though references to it are numerous in the course of 
 the next hundred years, it is curious that no one could say 
 that he had actually seen it. The wildest stories were 
 current as to the authorship; it was in turn imputed to 
 Frederick Barbarossa, Averrhoes, Campanella, Machiavel, 
 Erasmus, Rabelais, Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Boccaccio, 
 Poggio, Aretino, Ramus, even Milton. Campanella, to es- 
 cape the charge, declared that it was printed in 1538, 
 thirty years before he was born, but a statement made under 
 such conditions scarcely deserves credit. Sceptics were not 
 wanting, who denied that the book existed ; among these 
 were Bayle and Grotius, and there is little doubt that they 
 were right. There is, indeed a very rare De Tribus Imposto- 
 rtbus now in existence, but that is universally admitted to be 
 a forgery. It is not so certain who forged it, and why. 
 A very likely date is 1698, for, a few years before, Christina 
 of Sweden, who seems to have been unusually anxious to 
 peruse the book, offered 30,000 francs for a copy. The 
 bribe was a big one, and Christina may have been treated no 
 better than Ptolemy in his search for Aristotles. It is often 
 stated that the printer was Staub of Vienna, and the date 
 1753. Brunet quotes P. Marchand as his authority for the 
 fact that a De Tribus Impostoribus, which may, of course, have 
 been in manuscript, was sold in 1716. If so, the 1753 edition 
 was perhaps based on a copy of this. There is yet a third 
 
 ■ theory, that the Due de la Valliere and the Abb6 de Saint 
 Leger had it printed in 1753, with the intent of beguiling the 
 famous book-fancier, De Bure. This cannot be true, because 
 there is a record by the Due's librarian, to the effect that 
 his copy was bought in 1765*. 
 
 M. Philarete Chasles, an acute critic of our books and 
 
 ' manners, has commented upon the prevalence of literary 
 frauds as a characteristic trait of the eighteenth century. ' II 
 n'y a pas,' he says, ' dans I'histoire litteraire, de groupe plus 
 bizarre que celui des pseudonymes anglais, qui abondent 
 entre 1688 et 1800, ni de question plus neuve et moins ex- 
 pliqu^e. C'est alors qu'une trentaine d'ecrivains, entre 
 
 * Gustave Brunet, De Trib. Imp. T. C. Brunet, Manuel du Libraite. 
 I. Disraeli, Curiosities of Lit. vol. vi. 
 
30 
 
 lesquels je choisirai les plus notables, renoncent de parti 
 d^liber^ aux splendeurs du nom propre, et sacrifient leur 
 vanity a leur intdret ou a leurs passions. La gloire vient 
 quelquefois les chercher, toujours malgre eux'.' It has 
 already been pointed out, that, as civilisation advances, the 
 scope of the forger widens with the widening interests of 
 humanity in general. This is especially the case in the eight- 
 eenth century ; it is very difficult to classify the numerous crop 
 of fabrications that have to be dealt with. The few, however, 
 of which special mention can be made, fall fairly well under 
 three distinct heads : they are the political, religious or 
 politico-religious, the classical, and the strictly literary. 
 
 The first group is a somewhat miscellaneous one ; it 
 includes works of very varied character, but all spring from 
 the same kind of motive. Burke's Vindication of Natural 
 Society has been already mentioned ; it was besides a freak 
 of youth and of slight importance. M. Chasles maintains 
 that many of the fictions of Defoe were intended to be read 
 as veracious narratives and in various indirect ways to aid 
 the cause of nonconformity, of which their author was so 
 eminent a champion. Such would be the Memoirs of a 
 Cavalier, and that curious True Relation of the Appearance 
 of Mrs. Veal which served to puff" the sale of Drelincourt's 
 Consolations against Death. The vraisemblance of Defoe's 
 fiction is great, and, whatever his intent, it was certainly 
 taken in many cases for fact. Thus a learned physician 
 quotes medical details in a grave book, taken from the 
 Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe was less fortunate in his 
 Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which, though conceived 
 in a spirit of the bitterest satire, was taken in earnest, and 
 highly extolled by several churchmen. When the truth 
 was made apparent, it brought him to the pillory t. Since 
 Defoe, and largely through his influence, the fictitious 
 memoir has become a recognised literary type. Indeed, 
 the spheres of the novel and the autobiography tend to 
 overlap considerably; many novels, such as Villette, present 
 records of personal experience ; many autobiographies ap- 
 pear to be at least touched with imagination. One side 
 of the nonconformist movement is represented by Defoe, 
 another, the hostility to the Jesuits, by the strange impostor 
 George Psalmanaazaar. In his later days, Psalmanaazaar was 
 a blameless and hard-working literary hack, with whom 
 Johnson used to go and sit 'at an alehouse in the city,' 
 whom he admired and esteemed, and never contradicted, 
 
 * Chasles, Le dix-huitiime Siede en Angleterre, ii. 213. 
 t Chasles, op. cit. ii. 213-225. Morley, Early Writings of Defoe (Caris- 
 brooke Library). Minto, Life of Defoe. 
 
3T- 
 
 for he would 'as soon have thought of contradicting a bishop.' 
 The first half of his life was, however, a tissue of falsehood. 
 He has described it himself in his Memoirs. His real name 
 and country are uncertain, but he was probably born in the 
 South of France. He took the name of Salmaneser or 
 Psalmanaazaar, and passed himself off first as an Irishman, 
 then as a Japanese. At Sluys he fell in with an unprin- 
 cipled Scotch clergyman named Innys. By him he was induced 
 to play the part of a native of Formosa, who had been 
 brought to Europe by the Jesuits, and had become a convert 
 to the English church. He went to London with Innys, 
 and in 1704 published An Historical and Geographical De- 
 scription of Formosa. This contained a number of impossible 
 stories about that little known island, together with an 
 account of his own conversion, and violent attacks upon 
 the Jesuits, which speedily rendered the book popular. The 
 following is given as a specimen of the language of For- 
 mosa* — 'Gistaye, O Israel, Jerh vie oi Korian sai Pagot, 
 dan baynaye sen tuen badi tuen Egypto, kay tuen Kaa tuen 
 slapat,' i.e. 'Hear, O Israel, I am the Lord thy God, who 
 brought thee out of the land of Egypt, and out of the 
 house of bondage.' Innys pushed himself into promotion by 
 means of his protege, and Psalmanaazaar was able to live 
 on the success of his fraud. At last he was moved to repent 
 by a perusal of Law's Serious Call, made a confession, and 
 began to lead a decent and honest lifet. 
 , The forgeries of William Lauder sprang out of the hatred 
 of a Jacobite and Tory for the genius of the Puritan Milton. 
 He began by writing articles accusing the author of Para- 
 dise Lost of plagiarism, and presently reprinted these in 
 a pamphlet with a preface by Johnson. To establish his 
 parallels, he ascribed passages of his own invention either to 
 Milton or to the earlier writers from whom he pretended they 
 were borrowed. Then he became still bolder. He took 
 passages from Hogg's Latin version of the Paradise Lost, 
 and interpolated with these Grotius' Adamus Exul and the 
 writings of obscure poets, such as Massenius, Taubmannus 
 and Staphorstius. This finally led to his detection by Dr. 
 John Douglas, afterwards bishop of Salisbury, and an Oxford 
 tutor named Bowie J. 
 
 The classical forgeries of the age are of less importance. 
 In 1738, a Venetian poet, Jean Corradino dell' Aglio, 
 published a new edition of Catullus from a manuscript which 
 
 * Hist, and Geog. Descr. of Formosa, p. 273. 
 
 t Boswell's Johnson, ed. Hill, p. 314, app. A. Chasles, op. cit. ii. 225 229. 
 I. Disraeli, Curiosities of Lit. vol. vi. 
 X Pattison, Life of Milton. Chasles, op. cit. ii. 229-232. 
 
32 
 
 he said was found at Rome, but which was really due to his 
 own ingenuity*. Another imitation of Catullus was put for- 
 ward by Marchena, who had already tried his hand on 
 Petronius. Eichstadt of Jena, entering into the joke, pro- 
 fessed to have another version of the same fragment, and 
 corrected from it Marchena's errors of prosody t. Of the 
 same type as these are the forgeries of mediaeval Arabic 
 documents, produced by the Abbd Joseph Vella from 1789 to 
 1794. The object of these was to elucidate the relations of 
 the Turkish and Norman rulers of Sicily, and they were 
 ingeniously inserted by Vella in manuscripts which he had 
 rendered almost illegible. He claimed also to have found an 
 Arabic version of the lost books of Livy, but the only portion 
 he could produce was a manifest translation from the Epitome 
 of Florus. It is satisfactory to find that Vella was con- 
 demned to fifteen years' imprisonment for his misdoing %■ 
 
 As the eighteenth century labours heavily to its close, there 
 becomes visible the dawn of a new epoch of poetry. It 
 reveals itself in the resurgence of the perennial spirit of 
 romance, ardent as ever for beauty, and, above all, the beauty 
 of what is strange, and contemptuous as ever of literary 
 tradition and of literary commonplace. Among those in 
 whom this spirit first found expression must be set for ever 
 the names of Chatterton and of Macpherson. Chatterton is 
 the greatest of all forgers, not because of his success, for 
 after all he deceived none except Dean Milles and a few. 
 stupid provincial pedants ; all the real critics of his day. 
 Gray and Mason, Warton and Tyrwhitt, were against him. 
 As a man he is interesting for the tragic close that throws a 
 glamour over the whole of his short life ; as a poet for the 
 undeniable touch of genius, crude and immature enough,, 
 which yet bears the 'promise and potency' of a new song 
 unknown to the Dunciad. He is one of the greatest of those 
 'inheritors of unfulfilled renown' who star the pages of our- 
 literature, and later poets have never been slow to hail him 
 as a pioneer. It is hardly needful to recount the familiar 
 story of the Rowley poems. They were the work of extreme 
 youth, and it seems hardly conceivable that they were ever 
 credited out of Bristol. Professor Skeatnas conclusivelyproved 
 them to be forgeries, if proof were wanting, by tracing the 
 genesis of the Rowley dialect in the inaccurate dictionaries 
 of the day. The manuscripts, too, which still exist, will not 
 bear an hour's examination. But it is impossible to quit the 
 subject without an attempt at the fascinating and insoluble 
 
 * Biog. Univ. s. v. Corradino.. 
 + Lang, Books and Bookmen. 
 X Biog. Univ. s. v. Vella. Freeland, Lectures. 
 
33 
 
 problem of determining what were the motives of the boy-poet 
 in entering on a career of forgery. If only Browning had 
 'parleyed' with Chatterton !— but the task would have tried 
 even his power of psychological reconstruction. In the first 
 place it is clear that there were in Chatterton two personalities : 
 one_ the attorney's clerk, somewhat sordid and given to 
 dubious pleasures; the other of finer stuff, imaginative, 
 intense, creative. The first of these was glad enough to put 
 a few shillings in his pocket by the forgeries, but it was from 
 the second that in the true sense they came. This Chatterton 
 had his being in the past ; he had learnt to read in a black- 
 letter Bible ; he pored over history and every fragment of 
 antiquity that he came across : above all, the church of 
 St. Mary Redcliffe had enchained his fancy from childhood. 
 As he lay in the wind-blown grass and watched its majestic 
 spire, it became an 'angel-trodden stair' whereby his soul 
 moved back over four centuries, until Canynge, Rowley and 
 John a Iscam were far more real than the Burgums and 
 Catcotts with whom he daily consorted. And of this dream- 
 life his poems were a very vital part ; they must have seemed 
 to come to him across the ages, and not to be his in the same 
 sense as his occasional satires or the love-verses written to 
 please a friend. One more point completes the explanation. He 
 was indeed very proud, very conscious of his mental superiority 
 to his Bristol acquaintance, very eager for renown. When 
 he was six years old he cried out, ' Paint me an angel with 
 wings and a trumpet to trumpet my name over the world.' 
 Rossetti's lines sum up his nature : 
 
 ' With Shakspeare's manhood at a boy's wild heart, — 
 Through Hamlet's doubt to Shakspeare near allied, 
 And kin to Milton through his Satan's pride.' 
 
 But it was not in Bristol that he wanted renown ; he had 
 too thorough a contempt for his fellow-citizens ; the savour 
 of their applause would never win his secfet. It is not hard 
 to understand how such an one may have deliberately 
 preferred not to break the spell of his dream poetry by 
 writing his name at the bottom, forcing thus into definite 
 consciousness the fact that, after all, it was only the outcome 
 of his own art. In some paradoxical state of mind like this 
 must lie the secret of the Chatterton forgeries'*. 
 
 Macpherson stands to Gaelic poetry in somewhat the same 
 relation that Chatterton does to that of Middle English. But 
 probably the extent of Macpherson's forgeries has been 
 greatly exaggerated. The domineering personality of Dr. 
 
 * Alditte Chatterton, Life by Bell, Essay by W. W. Skeat. Masson, 
 English Poets. ' 
 
34 
 
 Johnson, ill informed with facts, has prejudfced alike con- 
 temporary and subsequent criticism. It was in 1760 that 
 Macpherson published his first translations from the Gaelic, 
 and in 1762 and 1763, he followed these up with the twin 
 epics of Fingal and Temora. These were the result of a tour 
 through the west Highlands, taken with two other Badenoch 
 men, in search of poetic material. They are poems full of 
 tears, written, according to the translator, by the last of the 
 Fienne, Ossian or Oisin the son of Finn, and preserved by 
 tradition. Since Macpherson wrote, the labours of Celtic 
 scholars have abundantly proved the existence in Scotland 
 and Ireland alike of a mass of literature of the Ossianic type, 
 some of which has lingered in the memory of the peasantry 
 until quite recent times, while other specimens are preserved 
 in the MSS. of James Macgregor, Dean of Lismore, who 
 died about 1551. On the other hand, the epics cannot have 
 been found by Macpherson in their present form ; it is 
 doubtful indeed whether there ever was a really primitive 
 epic ; and in Ftngal and Temora legends have been gathered 
 together from two distinct cycles, an early heroic one, and a 
 much later Fenian cycle, which first appears in the twelfth 
 century. How much in them is genuine, how much added by 
 Macpherson, specialists in Gaelic must decide ; at present 
 they cannot agree whether the Gaelic version published by 
 the Highland Society in 1807 is a translation from the English 
 or the original of it. But it seems safe to assert that there is 
 at least a nucleus of popular poetry, certainly as old as the 
 fifteenth century*. 
 
 The dawn of the romantic movement in France presents 
 an instance of a literary forgery parallel to those of Chatter- 
 ton and Macpherson. In 1803 a man named Vanderbourg 
 published a volume of poems by Clotilde de Surville. It 
 was stated that the authoress was a Provencal lady of the 
 early fifteenth century, and that the manuscript was in 
 the possession of her descendant, the Marquis de Sur- 
 ville. It is not certain whether the publisher or the 
 marquis wrote the poems, but at any rate they do not 
 belong to the date assigned. The language, the metre, and 
 the orthography are not of the fifteenth century, and the ideas 
 expressed are markedly later. Thus there are allusions to 
 Sappho, Lucretius and Catullus, none of whom were dis- 
 covered until the end of that century, and others which 
 imply a knowledge of the writings of Voltaire and of an 
 astronomical fact first ascertained in i789t. 
 
 * Ency. Brit. s. w. Gaelic, Celtic. Shairp, Poetry and Poets, and Macm. 
 Mag. vol. xxiv. 
 
 '_ t Hallam, Lit. of Eur. i. 3, 167. Biog. Univ. s. v. Surville. H. G. Hewlett^ 
 in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891. 
 
35 
 
 To the same type belong a number of imitations of primitive 
 forms of literature in various tongues. Such are the Scotch 
 ballads of Cunningham which Cromek was induced to publish, 
 those of Pinkerton, and those with which Robert Surtees of 
 Mainsforth duped Sir Walter Scott. Surtees had the genius 
 to write Bartram's Dirge and the Slaying of Fetherstonhaugh, 
 and the talent to give them an air of antiquity by leaving 
 lacunae to be filled up by conjectures of his own. Such, 
 too, are some of M. de Villemarqu6's Breton ballads, the 
 Macedonian songs of M. Verkovitch, and the collection of 
 Illyrian translations published by Prosper Mdrimde under 
 the title of La Guzla. M6rim6e is responsible too for 
 the ThMtre de Clara Gazul, an imaginary Spanish actress. 
 His motive for these supercheries was a purely artistic one ; 
 he prided himself on his skill in catching 'local colour,' and 
 enjoyed seeing it deceive the critics. Another work of the 
 same author, Lettres a une Inconnue, is an instance of the 
 essentially modern kind of literature already mentioned, which 
 is on the borderland of fact and fiction. The writer does not 
 tell us if the emotions he depicts are real or ideal. To do so 
 would be either to break the illusion, or to lay a heart bare 
 for our inspection. An artifice is pardonable which conceals 
 only what no one has a right to see. So too Mrs. Browning's 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese, though they record her own 
 experience, were fitly presented to the general public in an 
 impersonal form ; only those who could penetrate to the truth 
 were worthy to know it. 
 
 With the exception of such as have been already mentioned, 
 the present century has produced but few forgeries ; few, at 
 least, that have been as yet discovered. Possibly, the forger 
 has grown more astute; probably, the critics have grown 
 more clear-witted or more scientific. It was the microscope 
 that refuted Collier. About 1836, it was announced that a 
 Greek version of Sanchoniathon's Phoenician history by 
 Philon de Byblos had been found in a Portuguese convent. 
 This was the jest of a student of Brema, F. Wagenfeld. He 
 published a German translation, but the Greek text never 
 appeared. Then there are Mr. Shapira's manuscript of 
 Dduteronomy written upon the ends of synagogue rolls, 
 which M. Clermont-Ganneau detected, and the numerous 
 fabrications of Simonides. Several of the latter were bought 
 by public libraries, and even Dindorf was deceived by one 
 classical fragment. During recent years a number of letters, 
 purporting to be by Byron, Shelley and other great writers, 
 have been forged. A volume of spurious Shelley letters, with 
 a preface by Mr. Browning, was printed, and then withdrawn. 
 Finally, mention must be made of a curious parallel to the 
 
36 
 
 Fortndsan language invented by Psalmanaazaar. Two French- 
 men, M. Jean Parisot and M. A. Dejouy, elaborated, about 
 ten years ago, a dialect called Tansa, or Taensa, which they 
 located in a town of Taensa, near the Mississippi. They 
 succeeded in imposing on M. Lucien Adam, and published a 
 volume of Taensa songs, under the title Canctonero Americano^ 
 The fraud was only finally exploded in 1886*. 
 
 The foregoing pages contain a summary, necessarily im- 
 perfect, of the history of literary forgery, in its various 
 developments, during different ages and among different 
 peoples. The chronological order has been adopted, not 
 merely for convenience, but because, on the whole, it prer 
 sents the facts in their true mutual relations. In conclusion, 
 an attempt must be made to indicate the general considera- 
 tions which the survey suggests. In the first place, the 
 literary forger is emphatically the child of his time, and this 
 not merely in the obvious sense that his art is conditioned 
 by the existing limitations of literary science. He is always 
 in touch with the main current of ideas ; the chief interests 
 of the epoch to which he belongs are his chief interests. 
 When, as in the Renaissance, men's minds are bent on the 
 classics, he produces classical imitations ; when, as at the 
 end of the last century, they turn to primitive and forgotten 
 literatures, these become to him a new source of inspiration. 
 This, perhaps, could hardly have been predicted beforehand ; 
 a tendency might have been looked for in men who, after all, 
 are in many cases eccentrics, towards antagonism rathe^ 
 than sympathy with the spirit of their age. 
 
 Then again, literary forgery, like every other parasite, can 
 only flourish in a somewhat special environment. It pros- 
 pers in a society filled with men who are lovers of litera- 
 ture, yet ungifted with the faculty of discrimination ; thus 
 it has its vogue at the beginnings of literary movements, 
 before enthusiasm has been tempered by judgment. As the 
 art of the critic grows, the ingenuity of the forger must grow 
 too ; the crudities of Chatterton could not be tolerated in 
 our day for a moment. An atmosphere of polemic is 
 especially favourable to it ; few men are so enamoured of 
 truth and so careless of victory, that they will scrutinise 
 closely a document which tends to support the creed they 
 are fighting for in politics, philosophy, or religion. 
 
 Those on whom the forger preys are often easy victims. 
 No lover of books was ever a thoroughly degraded man, and the 
 upright are the least likely to suspect fraud in others. This is 
 true in a less degree of all kinds of collectors, and all in turn 
 suffer for it. It is not only books and bank-notes that are 
 
 * Brinton, Essays of an Amerkamst. 
 
i7 
 
 forged. There Is a steady demand for spurious coins, for 
 china, even for stamps, as well as for Old Masters by modern 
 hands. The cabmets of entomologists are full of foreign 
 specimens, masquerading as British rarities. In the Blackmore 
 Museum at Salisbury is a unique series of flint implements. 
 They are all the handiwork of a single artist known as 
 Flint-Jack, and few could distinguish them from those really 
 primitive. Booksellers' catalogues, again, which are scarcely 
 literature, though they are on the border-line, often contain 
 imaginary items, at very low prices. If they are asked for, 
 they have, of course, been already sold. A French biblio- 
 grapher describes a catalogue, the whole of which is a 
 forgery*. Everything, in fact, which has a collector's value 
 affords an opportunity to the unscrupulous. 
 
 Finally, the matter may be looked at briefly from the 
 ethical standpoint. Literary forgeries are of many kinds, 
 from the amusing hoax to the most barefaced and impudent 
 imposture. The moral judgment to be passed upon them 
 must vary accordingly. In many cases it can only be tenta- 
 tive, from sheer inability to discover the motive which 
 prompts them. A large proportion are rooted in the love 
 of money, and these it is easy to condemn. Others are 
 innocent enough, and spring merely from a well-developed 
 sense of humour. Of the religious and semi-religious for- 
 geries, a very numerous class, much has been said ; they are 
 puzzling, but may fairly claim to be tried only by contempo- 
 rary moral standards. And many of them are due to perverse 
 applications of a great principle, — the principle that moral 
 truth is in all things higher than that which is merely 
 material, ideal truth than truth of fact. There remain yet 
 a few cases, among which those of Collier and of Chatter- 
 ton are typical, where neither controversial fervour, nor greed 
 for lucre, nor the spirit of mischief provides an adequate 
 explanation. The most ingenious hypotheses fail to satisfy- 
 even those who frame them. It is only the negation of 
 a theory to put them down to some ' little twist of brain,' 
 such as often distorts the actions of the noblest souls and 
 dims the purple of a lifetime. 
 
 * Gustave Brunei, Fantaisies Bibliographiques. 
 
W^ I