discovery, and to give it additional importance
in the eyes of his protector, Airoldi,
archbishop of Heraclea, who paid all the
expenses of his researches, Vella manufactured
a correspondence between himself and the
ambassador, who had returned to Morocco,
in which he made the latter give an assurance
that there existed in the library of Fez a
second and more complete copy of the
manuscript found in the library of St. Martin;
that another work in continuation of the
manuscript had been discovered; and also a
series of medals, confirmatory of the history
and chronology of the document in question.

The imposture had such success, that the
King of Naples, to whom Vella presented his
translation of the supposed manuscript, wished
to send him on a mission to Morocco to make
further inquiries. This was as unfortunate a
turn as the royal favour could take; but,
luckily for Vella, circumstances occurred to
avert the disaster.

The translation of the Arabic manuscript
had been announced in all the journals of
Europe. The first volume was published in
1789, under the sanction of Airoldi. The
sixth volume appeared in 1792, and was to be
followed by two others. Vella was everywhere
courted, and loaded with pensions and honours.
Airoldi, however, having caused a facsimile
of the original manuscript which Vella had
taken great pains to alter and make nearly
illegible doubts arose as to its authenticity;
and finally, after the "translation" had been
everywhere read, everywhere celebrated, and
everywhere extracted from, the whole was
found to be a deception. The original
manuscript was nothing but a history of
Mahomet and his family, and had no relation
to Sicily whatever. Vella was induced to
confess his imposture, but not until he had
been threatened with torture.

In 1800, a Spaniard named Marchena,
attached to the army of the Rhine, amused
himself during the winter which he passed at
Basle by composing some fragments of
Petronius. These were published soon after,
and, in spite of the air of pleasantry which
ran through the preface and notes, the author
had so well imitated the style of his model
that many very accomplished scholars were
deceived, and were only set right by a
declaration of the truth on the part of the
publisher. The success of this mystification
struck the fancy of Marchena; and in 1806 he
published, under his own name, a fragment of
Catullus, which he pretended to have been
taken from a manuscript recently unrolled at
Herculaneum. But, this time he was beaten
with his own weapon. A professor of Jena,
Eiehstädt, announced in the following year,
that the library of that city possessed a very
ancient manuscript, in which were the same
verses of Catullus, with some important
variations. The German, under pretence of
correcting some errors of the copyist, pointed
out several faults in prosody, committed by
Marchena, and made sundry improvements
upon the political allusions of the Spamaro.

Poetical forgers have been comparatively
scarce. One of the most distinguished of
these was Vanderbourg, who in 1803
published some charming poetry under the name
of Clotilde de Surville, a female writer, said to
have been contemporary with Charles the
Seventh of France. The editor pretended to
have found the manuscript among the papers
of one of her descendants, the Marquis de
Surville, who was executed under the directory.
The public was at first the dupe of this
deception, but the critics were not long in
discovering the truth. "Independently," says
Charles Nodier, "of the purity of the language,
of the choice variation of the metres, of the
scrupulousness of the elisions, of the alternation
of the genders in the rhymes—a sacred
rule in the present day, bat unknown in the
time of Clotilde—of the perfection, in short,
of every verse, the true author has suffered to
escape some indications of deception which it
is impossible to mistake." Among these was
her quotation from Lucretius, whose works
had not been then discovered, and which
perhaps did not penetrate into France until
towards 1475; her mention of the seven
satellites of Saturn, the first of which was
observed for the first time by Huyghens, in
1635, and the last by Herschel in 1789; and
her translation of an ode of Sappho, the
fragments of whose works were not then
published. However, the poems attributed to
Clotilde are full of grace and delicacy—
sufficient, indeed, to induce any person with a
love of approbation not simply diseased and
fraudulent, to avow the authorship.

About the same period Fabre d'Olivet
published the "Poesies Occitaniques," a work
which professed to be a translation from the
Provençal and Langue d'Oc; and in his notes
he inserted fragments of the pretended originals.
"These passages," says Raynouard, "written
with spirit and grace, and often with energy,
have deceived the critics, who believed them
original, and have quoted them as such.
Wishing to give to these fragments of his
composition the advantage of passing for
authentic, the author employed a means
equally ingenious and piquant. In one of the
works professing to be translated, he mingled
some passages drawn from the poetical
manuscripts of the Troubadours; and by this
mixture of veritable and fictitious fragments,
he found it more easy to seduce the credulity
of the critics. He did more: as the language
of the old Troubadours, from whom he had
quoted passages in his notes, had some
obscurities, which, being cleared away, would
perhaps have facilitated the discovery of the
fraud, he reduced their language to the idiom
which he used himself; and by this means it
became much more difficult to doubt the
authenticity of these pretended productions,
which, for the rest, have a real merit of their
own, under any aspect."