more than a thousand pages in their support.
Nevertheless, they bore self-evident marks of
modern times. There were uncial letters
which no one knew; but these were said to
be undiscovered ancient Etruscan characters:
it was more difficult to defend the small
italic letter, for they were not used in the age
assigned to them; besides which, there were
dots on the letter i, a custom not practised until
the eleventh century. The style was copied
from the Latin of the Psalms and the Breviary.
But, Inghirami replied, that the manuscript
was the work of the secretary of the college
of the Etrurian augurs, who alone was
permitted to draw his materials from the
archives.

The only conjecture respecting the origin
of these "antiquities," that has any reasonable
foundation, is, that they were manufactured
by one of the Inghirami family; who, some
fifty years previously, had been the librarian
of the Vatican, and who might have been
influenced by a desire to establish the antiquity
of the family estate.

The writing of Christopher Columbus has,
on more than one occasion, furnished a
subject for fraudulent ingenuity. The Prayerbook
presented to him by the Pope, and
which he bequeathed to the Genoese
republic, contains a codicil, purporting to be
in his own hand-writing; but which,
apparently on very good grounds, has been
pronounced a forgery. Only the other day
we were told of a bottle having been
picked up at sea, containing, it was alleged,
an account of the discovery of America by
the discoverer himself. This last appears
to be a very promising performance of our
friends the Americans not very ingeniously
contrived, and classified by comparison with
other perversions of human dexterity, not
rising much beyond the dignity of a hoax.

Petrarch's first meeting with Laura took
place in the church of St. Clair, on a Good
Friday, the sixth of April, 1327, so says the
well-known inscription in Petrarch's Virgil.
Alas for the belief of our youth! This
famous inscription is said to be a forgery.
The sixth of April, 1327, had, it seems, the
perverseness to fall upon a Monday. But
facts and figures are proverbially impertinent.
The forger seems to have rather obtusely
misunderstood the second sonnet in the
printed editions (which differ somewhat from
the MS.), and never to have got so far as
the ninety-first sonnet, which would have
informed him that the meeting took place, not
in a church, but in a meadow. The Laura
of Sade, moreover, is ascertained not to be
the Laura of Petrarch, but Laura de Baux,
who resided in the vicinity of Vaucluse, who
died young, like all those  "whom the gods
love," and died, we are happy to say, for
Petrarch's sake, unmarried.

It is pleasant to find an attempt to impose
a fiction upon the world, fail most egregiously.
Such was the fate of the nevertheless deeply
planned scheme of the Duke de la Vallière
and the Abbé de St. Leger. These two.
notabilities attempted to palm off upon the great
bibliopolist De Bure, a copy of a work which
had long existed in name, but of which no
person had ever seen a copy. This was the
De Tribus Impostoribus. A work with this
name was manufactured by the Duke and
the Abbé, who caused it to be printed in the
Gothic character, with the date of 1598. Their
intention was to sell copies of it by degrees,
at very high prices; and De Bure was
honoured by being made the subject of their
first experiment. That learned man, however,
at once discovered the cheat, and the discomfiture
of the concoctors was most signal. De
Bure made two enemies by this piece of
sagacity; who subsequently attempted to
write down his reputation.

Spain has produced several very
accomplished forgers. About the end of the
sixteenth century, a Jesuit, named Jerome
Romain Higuera, applied himself to the task
of making up for the silence of the historians
on the subject of the establishment of
Christianity in Spain. By the aid of popular
traditions, and of every kind of document which
he could collect, he composed several
chronicles, and ascribed the most important of
them to Flavins Dexter, an historian cited
by St. Jerome, but whose histories were lost.
He made a confidant of Torialba, one of the
brothers of his order: who, going to Germany,
lost no time in announcing that he had found
in the library of Fulde an authentic MS.
containing the chronicles in question. The
Jesuits believed this story, and Torialba
addressed a copy of the MS. to Calderon, who
published it at Saragossa (4to. 1619), under
the title of Fragmentum Chronici Fl. Dextri,
cum Chronico Marei Maximi, et Additionibus
S. Branlionis et Helecani. Higuera, who went
so far as to pretend to enlighten various parts
of this work by notes, did not live to see its
publication, nor the controversies caused
thereby. Gabriel Pennot, an Augustin, was
the first to attack the authenticity of these
chronicles, and he had for an adversary
Thomas Vargas, whom he soon reduced to
silence.

The imposture of Joseph Vella will be long
remembered. Being at Palermo in 1782, he
accompanied the ambassador from Morocco in
a visit which that diplomatist made to the
Abbey of St. Martin, and where he was
admitted to see a very ancient Arabic
manuscript. Being aware of the desire which
existed to find in the Arabic writings
materials for the completion of the history of
Sicily, in which there was a gap of two
centuries, Vella took the hint, and, after the
departure of the ambassador, asserted that he
had found in the library of the Abbey a
precious manuscript containing the
correspondence between the Arabian governors of
Sicily and the sovereigns of Africa.

To confirm the authenticity of this pretended