(Vol. vii., p. 86.)
It is not for P. C. S. S. to explain the grounds on which Cardinal Wiseman
considers the _History of Formosa_, and the _Sicilian Code of Vella_, as
the most celebrated literary frauds of modern times. But he thinks that
before he penned the Query, MR. BREEN might have recollected the well-known
name of _George Psalmanazar_, and the extraordinary imposture so
successfully practised in 1704 by that good and learned person; a fraud
scarcely redeemed by the virtue and merits of a man of whom Dr. Johnson
said, that "he had never seen the close of the life of any one that he so
much wished his own to resemble, as that of Psalmanazar, for its purity and
devotion."
With respect to the _Sicilian Code of Vella_, MR. BREEN will find, on a
very little inquiry, that the work to which the Cardinal adverts (entitled
_Libro del Consiglio di Egitto, tradotto da Giuseppe Vella_) was printed at
Palermo in 1793; that the book, from beginning to end, is an entire fiction
of the learned canon; that the forgery was detected before the publication
of the second part--which, consequently, never saw the light; that the
detection was due to the celebrated orientalist Hager, whose account
thereof (a masterpiece of {140} analytical reasoning) was published in 1799
by Palm, the bookseller of Erlang (murdered in 1806 by order of the uncle
of the present French emperor). But this was not the only imposture of the
kind of which Vella was the author, and which his profound knowledge of
Arabic enabled him to execute in a way which it would scarcely have been
possible for any other European to have accomplished. He had published,
1791, at the Royal Press at Palermo, under the name of Alfonso Airoldi, a
fictitious _Codex Diplomaticus Siciliæ, sub Saracenorum Imperio_, to the
discovery of which ingenious fraud we are also indebted to the acute
Pyrrhonism of M. Hager.