The preceding article has reminded me of a subject by no means incurious
to the lovers of literature. A large volume might be composed on
literary impostors; their modes of deception, however, were frequently
repetitions; particularly those at the restoration of letters, when
there prevailed a _mania_ for burying spurious antiquities, that they
might afterwards be brought to light to confound their contemporaries.
They even perplex us at the present day. More sinister forgeries have
been performed by Scotchmen, of whom Archibald Bower, Lauder, and
Macpherson, are well known.
Even harmless impostures by some unexpected accident have driven an
unwary inquirer out of the course. George Steevens must again make his
appearance for a memorable trick played on the antiquary Gough. This was
the famous tombstone on which was engraved the drinking-horn of
Hardyknute, to indicate his last fatal carouse; for this royal Dane died
drunk! To prevent any doubt, the name, in Saxon characters, was
sufficiently legible. Steeped in pickle to hasten a precocious
antiquity, it was then consigned to the corner of a broker's shop, where
the antiquarian eye of Gough often pored on the venerable odds and ends;
it perfectly succeeded on the "Director of the Antiquarian Society." He
purchased the relic for a trifle, and dissertations of a due size were
preparing for the Archaeologia![212] Gough never forgave himself nor
Steevens for this flagrant act of ineptitude. On every occasion in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, when compelled to notice this illustrious
imposition, he always struck out his own name, and muffled himself up
under his titular office of "The Director!" Gough never knew that this
"modern antique" was only a piece of retaliation. In reviewing Masters's
Life of Baker he found two heads, one scratched down from painted glass
by George Steevens, who would have passed it off for a portrait of one
of our kings. Gough, on the watch to have a fling at George Steevens,
attacked his graphic performance, and reprobated a portrait which had
nothing human in it! Steevens vowed, that wretched as Gough deemed his
pencil to be, it should make "The Director" ashamed of his own eyes, and
be fairly taken in by something scratched much worse. Such was the
origin of his adoption of this fragment of a chimney-slab, which I have
seen, and with a better judge wondered at the injudicious antiquary, who
could have been duped by the slight and ill-formed scratches, and even
with a false spelling of the name, which, however, succeeded in being
passed off as a genuine Saxon inscription: but he had counted on his
man.[213] The trick is not so original as it seems. One De Grassis had
engraved on marble the epitaph of a mule, which he buried in his
vineyard: some time after, having ordered a new plantation on the spot,
the diggers could not fail of disinterring what lay ready for them. The
inscription imported that one Publius Grassus had raised this monument
to his mule! De Grassis gave it out as an odd coincidence of names, and
a prophecy about his own mule! It was a simple joke! The marble was
thrown by, and no more thought of. Several years after it rose into
celebrity, for with the erudite it then passed for an ancient
inscription, and the antiquary Poracchi inserted the epitaph in his work
on "Burials." Thus De Grassis and his mule, equally respectable, would
have come down to posterity, had not the story by some means got wind!
An incident of this nature is recorded in Portuguese history, contrived
with the intention to keep up the national spirit, and diffuse hopes of
the new enterprise of Vasco de Gama, who had just sailed on a voyage of
discovery to the Indies. Three stones were discovered near Cintra,
bearing in ancient characters a Latin inscription; a sibylline oracle
addressed prophetically "To the Inhabitants of the West!" stating that
when these three stones shall be found, the Ganges, the Indus, and the
Tagus should exchange their commodities! This was the pious fraud of a
Portuguese poet, sanctioned by the approbation of the king. When the
stones had lain a sufficient time in the damp earth, so as to become
apparently antique, our poet invited a numerous party to a dinner at his
country-house; in the midst of the entertainment a peasant rushed in,
announcing the sudden discovery of this treasure! The inscription was
placed among the royal collections as a sacred curiosity! The prophecy
was accomplished, and the oracle was long considered genuine!
In such cases no mischief resulted; the annals of mankind were not
confused by spurious dynasties and fabulous chronologies; but when
literary forgeries are published by those whose character hardly admits
of a suspicion that they are themselves the impostors, the difficulty of
assigning a motive only increases that of forming a decision; to adopt
or reject them may be equally dangerous.
In this class we must place Annius of Viterbo,[214] who published a
pretended collection of historians of the remotest antiquity, some of
whose _names_ had descended to us in the works of ancient writers, while
their works themselves had been lost. Afterwards he subjoined
commentaries to confirm their authority by passages from known authors.
These at first were eagerly accepted by the learned; the blunders of the
presumed editor, one of which was his mistaking the right name of the
historian he forged, were gradually detected, till at length the
imposture was apparent! The pretended originals were more remarkable for
their number than their volume; for the whole collection does not exceed
171 pages, which lessened the difficulty of the forgery; while the
commentaries which were afterwards published must have been manufactured
at the same time as the text. In favour of Annius, the high rank he
occupied at the Roman Court, his irreproachable conduct, and his
declaration that he had recovered some of these fragments at Mantua, and
that others had come from Armenia, induced many to credit these
pseudo-historians. A literary war soon kindled; Niceron has
discriminated between four parties engaged in this conflict. One party
decried the whole of the collection as gross forgeries; another
obstinately supported their authenticity; a third decided that they were
forgeries before Annius possessed them, who was only credulous; while a
fourth party considered them as partly authentic, and ascribed their
blunders to the interpolations of the editor, to increase their
importance. Such as they were, they scattered confusion over the whole
face of history. The false Berosus opens his history before the deluge,
when, according to him, the Chaldeans through preceding ages had
faithfully preserved their historical evidences! Annius hints, in his
commentary, at the archives and public libraries of the Babylonians: the
days of Noah comparatively seemed modern history with this dreaming
editor. Some of the fanciful writers of Italy were duped: Sansovino, to
delight the Florentine nobility, accommodated them with a new title of
antiquity in their ancestor Noah, _Imperatore e monarcha delle genti,
visse e mori in quelle parti._ The Spaniards complained that in forging
these fabulous origins of different nations, a new series of kings from
the ark of Noah had been introduced by some of their rhodomontade
historians to pollute the sources of their history. Bodin's otherwise
valuable works are considerably injured by Annius's supposititious
discoveries. One historian died of grief, for having raised his
elaborate speculations on these fabulous originals; and their credit was
at length so much reduced, that Pignori and Maffei both announced to
their readers that they had not referred in their works to the pretended
writers of Annius! Yet, to the present hour, these presumed forgeries
are not always given up. The problem remains unsolved--and the silence
of the respectable Annius, in regard to the forgery, as well as what he
affirmed when alive, leave us in doubt whether he really intended to
laugh at the world by these fairy tales of the giants of antiquity.
Sanchoniathon, as preserved by Eusebius, may be classed among these
ancient writings or forgeries, and has been equally rejected and
defended.
Another literary forgery, supposed to have been grafted on those of
Annius, involved the Inghirami family. It was by digging in their
grounds that they discovered a number of Etruscan antiquities,
consisting of inscriptions, and also fragments of a chronicle, pretended
to have been composed sixty years before the vulgar era. The characters
on the marbles were the ancient Etruscan, and the historical work tended
to confirm the pretended discoveries of Annius. They were collected and
enshrined in a magnificent folio by Curtius Inghirami, who, a few years
after, published a quarto volume exceeding one thousand pages to support
their authenticity. Notwithstanding the erudition of the forger, these
monuments of antiquity betrayed their modern condiment.[215] 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 letters, for they were not used in the age assigned to them;
besides that, there were dots on the letter _i_, a custom not practised
till the eleventh century. The style was copied from the Latin of the
Psalms and the Breviary; but Inghirami discovered that there had been an
intercourse between the Etruscans and the Hebrews, and that David had
imitated the writings of Noah and his descendants! Of Noah the chronicle
details speeches and anecdotes!
The Romans, who have preserved so much of the Etruscans, had not,
however, noticed a single fact recorded in these Etruscan antiquities.
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, and who, it would seem, was the only scribe
who has favoured posterity with so much secret history. It was urged in
favour of the authenticity of these Etruscan monuments, that Inghirami
was so young an antiquary at the time of the discovery, that he could
not even explain them; and that when fresh researches were made on the
spot, other similar monuments were also disinterred, where evidently
they had long lain; the whole affair, however contrived, was confined to
the _Inghirami family_. One of them, half a century before, had been the
librarian of the Vatican, and to him is ascribed the honour of the
forgeries which he buried where he was sure they would be found. This,
however, is a mere conjecture! Inghirami, who published and defended
their authenticity, was not concerned in their fabrication; the design
was probably merely to raise the antiquity of Volaterra, the family
estate of the Inghirami; and for this purpose one of its learned
branches had bequeathed his posterity a collection of spurious
historical monuments, which tended to overturn all received ideas on the
first ages of history.[216]
It was probably such impostures, and those of _false decretals of_
Isidore, which were forged for the maintenance of the papal supremacy,
and for eight hundred years formed the fundamental basis of the canon
law, the discipline of the church, and even the faith of Christianity,
which led to the monstrous pyrrhonism of father Hardouin, who, with
immense erudition, had persuaded himself that, excepting the Bible and
Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Pliny the elder, with fragments of Cicero,
Virgil, and Horace, all the remains of classical literature were
forgeries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries! In two
dissertations he imagined that he had proved that the AEneid was not
written by Virgil, nor the Odes of Horace by that poet. Hardouin was one
of those wrong-headed men who, once having fallen into a delusion,
whatever afterwards occurs to them on their favourite subject only tends
to strengthen it. He died in his own faith! He seems not to have been
aware that by ascribing such prodigal inventions as Plutarch,
Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and other historians, to the men he did, he
was raising up an unparalleled age of learning and genius when monks
could only write meagre chronicles, while learning and genius themselves
lay in an enchanted slumber with a suspension of all their vital powers.
There are numerous instances of the forgeries of smaller documents. The
Prayer-book of Columbus, presented to him by the Pope, which the great
discoverer of a new world bequeathed to the Genoese republic, has a
codicil in his own writing, as one of the leaves testifies, but as
volumes composed against its authenticity deny. The famous description
in Petrarch's Virgil, so often quoted, of his first _rencontre_ with
Laura in the church of St. Clair on a Good Friday, 6th April, 1327, it
has been recently attempted to be shown is a forgery. By calculation, it
appears that the 6th April, 1327, fell on a Monday! The Good Friday
seems to have been a blunder of the manufacturer of the note. He was
entrapped by reading the second sonnet, as it appears in the _printed_
editions!
Era il giorno ch' al sol _si scolorana_
_Per la_ pieta del suo fattore i rai.
"It was on the day when the rays of the sun were obscured by compassion
for his Maker." The forger imagined this description alluded to Good
Friday and the eclipse at the Crucifixion. But how stands the passage in
the MS. in the Imperial Library of Vienna, which Abbe Costaing has
found?
Era il giorno ch' al sol _di color raro_
_Parve_ la pieta da suo fattore, _ai rai_
Quand Io fu preso; e non mi guardai
Che ben vostri occhi dentro mi legaro.
"It was on the day that I was captivated, devotion for its Maker
appeared in the rays of a brilliant sun, and I did not well consider
that it was your eyes that enchained me!"
The first meeting, according to the Abbe Costaing, was not in a
_church_, but in a _meadow_--as appears by the ninety-first sonnet. The
Laura of Sade was _not_ the Laura of Petrarch, but Laura de Baux,
unmarried, and who died young, residing in the vicinity of Vaucluse.
Petrarch had often viewed her from his own window, and often enjoyed her
society amidst her family.[217] If the Abbe Costaing's discovery be
confirmed, the good name of Petrarch is freed from the idle romantic
passion for a married woman. It would be curious if the famous story of
the first meeting with Laura in the church of St. Clair originated in
the blunder of the forger's misconception of a passage which was
incorrectly printed, as appears by existing manuscripts!
Literary forgeries have been introduced into bibliography; dates have
been altered; fictitious titles affixed; and books have been reprinted,
either to leave out or to interpolate whole passages! I forbear entering
minutely into this part of the history of literary forgery, for this
article has already grown voluminous. When we discover, however, that
one of the most magnificent of _amateurs_, and one of the most critical
of bibliographers, were concerned in a forgery of this nature, it may be
useful to spread an alarm among collectors. The Duke de la Valliere, and
the Abbe de St. Leger once concerted together to supply the eager
purchaser of literary rarities with a copy of _De Tribus Impostoribus_,
a book, by the date, pretended to have been printed in 1598, though
probably a modern forgery of 1698. The title of such a work had long
existed by rumour, but never was a copy seen by man! Works printed with
this title have all been proved to be modern fabrications. A copy,
however, of the _introuvable_ original was sold at the Duke de la
Valliere's sale! The history of this volume is curious. The Duke and the
Abbe having manufactured a text, had it printed in the old Gothic
character, under the title, _De Tribus Impostoribus_. They proposed to
put the great bibliopolist, De Bure, in good humour, whose agency would
sanction the imposture. They were afterwards to dole out copies at
twenty-five louis each, which would have been a reasonable price for a
book which no one ever saw! They invited De Bure to dinner, flattered
and cajoled him, and, as they imagined, at a moment they had wound him
up to their pitch, they exhibited their manufacture; the keen-eyed
glance of the renowned cataloguer of the "Bibliographie Instructive"
instantly shot like lightning over it, and, like lightning, destroyed
the whole edition. He not only discovered the forgery, but reprobated
it! He refused his sanction; and the forging Duke and Abbe, in
confusion, suppressed the _livre introuvable_; but they owed a grudge to
the honest bibliographer, and attempted to write down the work whence
the De Bures derive their fame.
Among the extraordinary literary impostors of our age--if we except
Lauder, who, detected by the Ithuriel pen of Bishop Douglas, lived to
make his public recantation of his audacious forgeries, and Chatterton,
who has buried his inexplicable story in his own grave, a tale, which
seems but half told--we must place a man well known in the literary
world under the assumed name of George Psalmanazar. He composed his
autobiography as the penance of contrition, not to be published till he
was no more, when all human motives have ceased which might cause his
veracity to be suspected. The life is tedious; but I have curiously
traced the progress of the mind in an ingenious imposture, which is
worth preservation. The present literary forgery consisted of
personating a converted islander of Formosa: a place then little known
but by the reports of the Jesuits, and constructing a language and a
history of a new people and a new religion, entirely of his own
invention! This man was evidently a native of the south of France;
educated in some provincial college of the Jesuits, where he had heard
much of their discoveries of Japan; he had looked over their maps, and
listened to their comments. He forgot the manner in which the Japanese
wrote; but supposed, like orientalists, they wrote from the right to the
left, which he found difficult to manage. He set about excogitating an
alphabet; but actually forgot to give names to his letters, which
afterwards baffled him before literary men.
He fell into gross blunders; having inadvertently affirmed that the
Formosans sacrificed eighteen thousand male infants annually, he
persisted in not lessening the number. It was proved to be an
impossibility in so small an island, without occasioning a depopulation.
He had made it a principle in this imposture never to vary when he had
once said a thing. All this was projected in haste, fearful of detection
by those about him.
He was himself surprised at his facility of invention, and the progress
of his forgery. He had formed an alphabet, a considerable portion of a
new language, a grammar, a new division of the year into twenty months,
and a new religion! He had accustomed himself to write his language; but
being an inexpert writer with the unusual way of writing backwards, he
found this so difficult, that he was compelled to change the complicated
forms of some of his letters. He now finally quitted his home, assuming
the character of a Formosan convert, who had been educated by the
Jesuits. He was then in his fifteenth or sixteenth year. To support his
new character, he practised some religious mummeries; he was seen
worshipping the rising and setting sun. He made a prayer-book with rude
drawings of the sun, moon, and stars, to which he added some gibberish
prose and verse, written in his invented character, muttering or
chanting it, as the humour took him. His custom of eating raw flesh
seemed to assist his deception more than the sun and moon.[218]
In a garrison at Sluys he found a Scotch regiment in the Dutch pay; the
commander had the curiosity to invite our Formosan to confer with Innes,
the chaplain to his regiment. This Innes was probably the chief cause of
the imposture being carried to the extent it afterwards reached. Innes
was a clergyman, but a disgrace to his cloth. As soon as he fixed his
eye on our Formosan, he hit on a project; it was nothing less than to
make Psalmanazar the ladder of his own ambition, and the stepping-place
for him to climb up to a good living! Innes was a worthless character;
as afterwards appeared, when by an audacious imposition Innes practised
on the Bishop of London, he avowed himself to be the author of an
anonymous work, entitled "A Modest Inquiry after Moral Virtue;" for this
he obtained a good living in Essex: the real author, a poor Scotch
clergyman, obliged him afterwards to disclaim the work in print, and to
pay him the profit of the edition which Innes had made! He lost his
character, and retired to the solitude of his living; if not penitent,
at least mortified.
Such a character was exactly adapted to become the foster-father of
imposture. Innes courted the Formosan, and easily won on the adventurer,
who had hitherto in vain sought for a patron. Meanwhile no time was lost
by Innes to inform the unsuspicious and generous Bishop of London of the
prize he possessed--to convert the Formosan was his ostensible pretext;
to procure preferment his concealed motive. It is curious enough to
observe, that the ardour of conversion died away in Innes, and the most
marked neglect of his convert prevailed, while the answer of the bishop
was protracted or doubtful. He had at first proposed to our Formosan
impostor to procure his discharge, and convey him to England; this was
eagerly consented to by our pliant adventurer. A few Dutch schellings,
and fair words, kept him in good humour; but no letter coming from the
bishop, there were fewer words, and not a stiver! This threw a new light
over the character of Innes to the inexperienced youth. Psalmanazar
sagaciously now turned all his attention to some Dutch ministers; Innes
grew jealous lest they should pluck the bird which he had already in his
net. He resolved to baptize the impostor--which only the more convinced
Psalmanazar that Innes was one himself; for before this time Innes had
practised a stratagem on him which had clearly shown what sort of a man
his Formosan was.
This stratagem was this: he made him translate a passage in Cicero, of
some length, into his pretended language, and give it him in writing;
this was easily done, by Psalmanazar's facility of inventing characters.
After Innes had made him construe it, he desired to have another version
of it on another paper. The proposal, and the arch manner of making it,
threw our impostor into the most visible confusion. He had had but a
short time to invent the first paper, less to recollect it; so that in
the second transcript not above half the words were to be found which
existed in the first. Innes assumed a solemn air, and Psalmanazar was on
the point of throwing himself on his mercy, but Innes did not wish to
unmask the impostor; he was rather desirous of fitting the mask closer
to his face. Psalmanazar, in this hard trial, had given evidence of
uncommon facility, combined with a singular memory. Innes cleared his
brow, smiled with a friendly look, and only hinted in a distant manner
that he ought to be careful to be better provided for the future! An
advice which Psalmanazar afterwards bore in mind, and at length produced
the forgery of an entire new language; and which, he remarkably
observes, "by what I have tried since I came into England, I cannot say
but I could have compassed it with less difficulty than can be conceived
had I applied closely to it." When a version of the catechism was made
into the pretended Formosan language, which was submitted to the
judgment of the first scholars, it appeared to them grammatical, and was
pronounced to be a real language, from the circumstance that it
resembled no other! and they could not conceive that a stripling could
be the inventor of a language. If the reader is curious to examine this
extraordinary imposture, I refer him to that literary curiosity, "An
Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, with Accounts of the
Religion, Customs and Manners of the Inhabitants, by George Psalmanazar,
a Native of the said Isle," 1704; with numerous plates, wretched
inventions! of their dress! religious ceremonies! their tabernacle and
altars to the sun, the moon, and the ten stars! their architecture! the
viceroy's castle! a temple! a city house! a countryman's house! and the
Formosan alphabet! In his conferences before the Royal Society with a
Jesuit just returned from China, the Jesuit had certain strong
suspicions that our hero was an impostor. The good father remained
obstinate in his own conviction, but could not satisfactorily
communicate it to others; and Psalmanazar, after politely asking pardon
for the expression, complains of the Jesuit that "HE _lied most
impudently," mentitur impudentissime!_ Dr. Mead absurdly insisted
Psalmanazar was a Dutchman or a German; some thought him a Jesuit in
disguise, a tool of the non-jurors; the Catholics thought him bribed by
the Protestants to expose their church; the Presbyterians that he was
paid to explode their doctrine, and cry up episcopacy! This fabulous
history of Formosa seems to have been projected by his artful prompter
Innes, who put Varenius into Psalmanazar's hands to assist him;
trumpeted forth in the domestic and foreign papers an account of this
converted Formosan; maddened the booksellers to hurry the author, who
was scarcely allowed two months to produce this extraordinary volume;
and as the former accounts which the public possessed of this island
were full of monstrous absurdities and contradictions, these assisted
the present imposture. Our forger resolved not to describe new and
surprising things as they had done, but rather studied to clash with
them, probably that he might have an opportunity of pretending to
correct them. The first edition was immediately sold; the world was more
divided than ever in opinion; in a second edition he prefixed a
vindication!--the unhappy forger got about twenty guineas for an
imposture, whose delusion spread far and wide! Some years afterwards
Psalmanazar was engaged in a minor imposture; one man had persuaded him
to father a white composition called the _Formosan japan!_ which was to
be sold at a high price! It was curious for its whiteness, but it had
its faults. The project failed, and Psalmanazar considered the
miscarriage of the _white Formosan japan_ as a providential warning to
repent of all his impostures of Formosa!
Among these literary forgeries may be classed several ingenious ones
fabricated for a _political_ purpose. We had certainly numerous ones
during our civil wars in the reign of Charles the First. This is not the
place to continue the controversy respecting the mysterious _Eikon
Basilike_, which has been ranked among them, from the ambiguous claim of
Gauden.[219] A recent writer who would probably incline not to leave the
monarch, were he living, not only his head but the little fame he might
obtain by the "Verses" said to be written by him at Carisbrook Castle,
would deprive him also of these. Henderson's death-bed recantation is
also reckoned among them; and we have a large collection of "Letters of
Sir Henry Martin to his Lady of Delight," which were the satirical
effusions of a wit of that day, but by the price they have obtained, are
probably considered as genuine ones, and exhibit an amusing picture of
his loose rambling life.[220] There is a ludicrous speech of the strange
Earl of Pembroke, which was forged by the inimitable Butler. Sir John
Birkenhead, a great humourist and wit, had a busy pen in these spurious
letters and speeches.[221]