Some authors have practised singular impositions on the public.
Varillas, the French historian, enjoyed for some time a great reputation
in his own country for his historical compositions; but when they became
more known, the scholars of other countries destroyed the reputation
which he had unjustly acquired. His continual professions of sincerity
prejudiced many in his favour, and made him pass for a writer who had
penetrated into the inmost recesses of the cabinet; but the public were
at length undeceived, and were convinced that the historical anecdotes
which Varillas put off for authentic facts had no foundation, being
wholly his own inventions--though he endeavoured to make them pass for
realities by affected citations of titles, instructions, letters,
memoirs, and relations, all of them imaginary! He had read almost
everything historical, printed and manuscript; but his fertile political
imagination gave his conjectures as facts, while he quoted at random his
pretended authorities. Burnet's book against Varillas is a curious
little volume.[43]
Gemelli Carreri, a Neapolitan gentleman, for many years never quitted
his chamber; confined by a tedious indisposition, he amused himself with
writing a _Voyage round the World_; giving characters of men, and
descriptions of countries, as if he had really visited them: and his
volumes are still very interesting. I preserve this anecdote as it has
long come down to us; but Carreri, it has been recently ascertained, met
the fate of Bruce--for he had visited the places he has described;
Humboldt and Clavigero have confirmed his local knowledge of Mexico and
of China, and found his book useful and veracious. Du Halde, who has
written so voluminous an account of China, compiled it from the Memoirs
of the Missionaries, and never travelled ten leagues from Paris in his
life,--though he appears, by his writings, to be familiar with Chinese
scenery.
Damberger's Travels some years ago made a great sensation--and the
public were duped; they proved to be the ideal voyages of a member of
the German Grub-street, about his own garret. Too many of our "Travels"
have been manufactured to fill a certain size; and some which bear names
of great authority were not written by the professed authors.
There is an excellent observation of an anonymous author:--"_Writers_
who never visited foreign countries, and _travellers_ who have run
through immense regions with fleeting pace, have given us long accounts
of various countries and people; evidently collected from the idle
reports and absurd traditions of the ignorant vulgar, from whom only
they could have received those relations which we see accumulated with
such undiscerning credulity."
Some authors have practised the singular imposition of announcing a
variety of titles of works preparing for the press, but of which nothing
but the titles were ever written.
Paschal, historiographer of France, had a reason for these ingenious
inventions; he continually announced such titles, that his pension for
writing on the history of France might not be stopped. When he died, his
historical labours did not exceed six pages!
Gregorio Leti is an historian of much the same stamp as Varillas. He
wrote with great facility, and hunger generally quickened his pen. He
took everything too lightly; yet his works are sometimes looked into for
many anecdotes of English history not to be found elsewhere; and perhaps
ought not to have been there if truth had been consulted. His great aim
was always to make a book: he swells his volumes with digressions,
intersperses many ridiculous stories, and applies all the repartees he
collected from old novel-writers to modern characters.
Such forgeries abound; the numerous "Testaments Politiques" of Colbert,
Mazarin, and other great ministers, were forgeries usually from the
Dutch press, as are many pretended political "Memoirs."
Of our old translations from the Greek and Latin authors, many were
taken from French versions.
The Travels, written in Hebrew, of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, of which we
have a curious translation, are, I believe, apocryphal. He describes a
journey, which, if ever he took, it must have been with his night-cap
on; being a perfect dream! It is said that to inspirit and give
importance to his nation, he pretended that he had travelled to all the
synagogues in the East; he mentions places which he does not appear ever
to have seen, and the different people he describes no one has known. He
calculates that he has found near eight hundred thousand Jews, of which
about half are independent, and not subjects of any Christian or Gentile
sovereign. These fictitious travels have been a source of much trouble
to the learned; particularly to those who in their zeal to authenticate
them followed the aërial footsteps of the Hyppogriffe of Rabbi Benjamin.
He affirms that the tomb of Ezekiel, with the library of the first and
second temples, were to be seen in his time at a place on the banks of
the river Euphrates; Wesselius of Groningen, and many other literati,
travelled on purpose to Mesopotamia, to reach the tomb and examine the
library; but the fairy treasures were never to be seen, nor even heard
of!
The first on the list of impudent impostors is Annius of Viterbo, a
Dominican, and master of the sacred palace under Alexander VI. He
pretended he had discovered the entire works of Sanchoniatho, Manetho,
Berosus, and others, of which only fragments are remaining. He published
seventeen books of antiquities! But not having any MSS. to produce,
though he declared he had found them buried in the earth, these literary
fabrications occasioned great controversies; for the author died before
he made up his mind to a confession. At their first publication
universal joy was diffused among the learned. Suspicion soon rose, and
detection followed. However, as the forger never would acknowledge
himself as such, it has been ingeniously conjectured that he himself was
imposed on, rather than that he was the impostor; or, as in the case of
Chatterton, possibly all may not be fictitious. It has been said that a
great volume in MS., anterior by two hundred years to the seventeen
books of Annius, exists in the Bibliothèque Colbertine, in which these
pretended histories were to be read; but as Annius would never point out
the sources of his, the whole may be considered as a very wonderful
imposture. I refer the reader to Tyrwhitt's Vindication of his Appendix
to Rowley's or Chatterton's Poems, p. 140, for some curious
observations, and some facts of literary imposture.
An extraordinary literary imposture was that of one Joseph Vella, who,
in 1794, was an adventurer in Sicily, and pretended that he possessed
seventeen of the lost books of Livy in Arabic: he had received this
literary treasure, he said, from a Frenchman, who had purloined it from
a shelf in St. Sophia's church at Constantinople. As many of the Greek
and Roman classics have been translated by the Arabians, and many were
first known in Europe in their Arabic dress, there was nothing
improbable in one part of his story. He was urged to publish these
long-desired books; and Lady Spencer, then in Italy, offered to defray
the expenses. He had the effrontery, by way of specimen, to edit an
Italian translation of the sixtieth book, but that book took up no more
than one octavo page! A professor of Oriental literature in Prussia
introduced it in his work, never suspecting the fraud; it proved to be
nothing more than the epitome of Florus. He also gave out that he
possessed a code which he had picked up in the abbey of St. Martin,
containing the ancient history of Sicily in the Arabic period,
comprehending above two hundred years; and of which ages their own
historians were entirely deficient in knowledge. Vella declared he had a
genuine official correspondence between the Arabian governors of Sicily
and their superiors in Africa, from the first landing of the Arabians in
that island. Vella was now loaded with honours and pensions! It is true
he showed Arabic MSS., which, however, did not contain a syllable of
what he said. He pretended he was in continual correspondence with
friends at Morocco and elsewhere. The King of Naples furnished him with
money to assist his researches. Four volumes in quarto were at length
published! Vella had the adroitness to change the Arabic MSS. he
possessed, which entirely related to Mahomet, to matters relative to
Sicily; he bestowed several weeks' labour to disfigure the whole,
altering page for page, line for line, and word for word, but
interspersed numberless dots, strokes, and flourishes; so that when he
published a fac-simile, every one admired the learning of Vella, who
could translate what no one else could read. He complained he had lost
an eye in this minute labour; and every one thought his pension ought to
have been increased. Everything prospered about him, except his eye,
which some thought was not so bad neither. It was at length discovered
by his blunders, &c., that the whole was a forgery: though it had now
been patronised, translated, and extracted through Europe. When this MS.
was examined by an Orientalist, it was discovered to be nothing but a
history of _Mahomet and his family_. Vella was condemned to
imprisonment.
The Spanish antiquary, Medina Conde, in order to favour the pretensions
of the church in a great lawsuit, forged deeds and inscriptions, which
he buried in the ground, where he knew they would shortly be dug up.
Upon their being found, he published engravings of them, and gave
explanations of their unknown characters, making them out to be so many
authentic proofs and evidences of the contested assumptions of the
clergy.
The Morocco ambassador purchased of him a copper bracelet of Fatima,
which Medina proved by the Arabic inscription and many certificates to
be genuine, and found among the ruins of the Alhambra, with other
treasures of its last king, who had hid them there in hope of better
days. This famous bracelet turned out afterwards to be the work of
Medina's own hand, made out of an old brass candlestick!
George Psalmanazar, to whose labours we owe much of the great Universal
History, exceeded in powers of deception any of the great impostors of
learning. His Island of Formosa was an illusion eminently bold,[44] and
maintained with as much felicity as erudition; and great must have been
that erudition which could form a pretended language and its grammar,
and fertile the genius which could invent the history of an unknown
people: it is said that the deception was only satisfactorily
ascertained by his own penitential confession; he had defied and
baffled the most learned.[45] The literary impostor Lauder had much more
audacity than ingenuity, and he died contemned by all the world.[46]
Ireland's "Shakspeare" served to show that commentators are not blessed,
necessarily, with an interior and unerring tact.[47] Genius and learning
are ill directed in forming literary impositions, but at least they must
be distinguished from the fabrications of ordinary impostors.
A singular forgery was practised on Captain Wilford by a learned Hindu,
who, to ingratiate himself and his studies with the too zealous and
pious European, contrived, among other attempts, to give the history of
Noah and his three sons, in his "Purana," under the designation of
Satyavrata. Captain Wilford having _read_ the passage, transcribed it
for Sir William Jones, who translated it as a curious extract; the whole
was an interpolation by the dexterous introduction of a forged sheet,
discoloured and prepared for the purpose of deception, and which, having
served his purpose for the moment, was afterwards withdrawn. As books in
India are not bound, it is not difficult to introduce loose leaves. To
confirm his various impositions, this learned forger had the patience to
write two voluminous sections, in which he connected all the legends
together in the style of the _Puranas_, consisting of 12,000 lines. When
Captain Wilford resolved to collate the manuscript with others, the
learned Hindu began to disfigure his own manuscript, the captain's, and
those of the college, by erasing the name of the country and
substituting that of Egypt. With as much pains, and with a more
honourable direction, our Hindu Lauder might have immortalized his
invention.
We have authors who sold their names to be prefixed to works they never
read; or, on the contrary, have prefixed the names of others to their
own writings. Sir John Hill, once when he fell sick, owned to a friend
that he had over-fatigued himself with writing seven works at once! one
of which was on architecture, and another on cookery! This hero once
contracted to translate Swammerdam's work on insects for fifty guineas.
After the agreement with the bookseller, he recollected that he did not
understand a word of the Dutch language! Nor did there exist a French
translation! The work, however, was not the less done for this small
obstacle. Sir John bargained with another translator for twenty-five
guineas. The second translator was precisely in the same situation as
the first--as ignorant, though not so well paid as the knight. He
rebargained with a third, who perfectly understood his original, for
twelve guineas! So that the translators who could not translate feasted
on venison and turtle, while the modest drudge, whose name never
appeared to the world, broke in patience his daily bread! The craft of
authorship has many mysteries.[48] One of the great patriarchs and
primeval dealers in English literature was Robert Green, one of the most
facetious, profligate, and indefatigable of the Scribleri family. He
laid the foundation of a new dynasty of literary emperors. The first act
by which he proved his claim to the throne of Grub-street has served as
a model to his numerous successors--it was an ambidextrous trick! Green
sold his "Orlando Furioso" to two different theatres, and is among the
first authors in English literary history who wrote as a _trader_;[49]
or as crabbed Anthony Wood phrases it, in the language of celibacy and
cynicism, "he wrote to maintain his _wife_, and that high and loose
course of living which _poets generally follow_." With a drop still
sweeter, old Anthony describes Gayton, another worthy; "he came up to
London to live in a _shirking condition_, and wrote _trite things_
merely to get bread to sustain him and his _wife_."[50] The hermit
Anthony seems to have had a mortal antipathy against the Eves of
literary men.