ON PUCK THE COMMENTATOR.

Literary forgeries recently have been frequently indulged in, and it is urged that they are of an innocent nature; but impostures more easily practised than detected leave their mischief behind, to take effect at a distant period; and as I shall show, may entrap even the judicious! It may require no high exertion of genius to draw up a grave account of an ancient play-wright whose name has never reached us, or to give an extract from a volume inaccessible to our inquiries and, as dulness is no proof of spuriousness, forgeries, in time, mix with authentic documents.208

We have ourselves witnessed versions of Spanish and Portuguese poets, which are passed on their unsuspicious readers without difficulty, but in which no parts of the pretended originals can be traced; and to the present hour, whatever antiquaries may affirm, the poems of Chatterton209 and Ossian210 are veiled in mystery!

If we possessed the secret history of the literary life of George Steevens, it would display an unparalleled series of arch deception and malicious ingenuity. He has been happily characterised by Gifford as “the Puck of Commentators!” Steevens is a creature so spotted over with literary forgeries and adulterations, that any remarkable one about the time he flourished may be attributed to him. They were the habits of a depraved mind, and there was a darkness in his character many shades deeper than belonged to Puck; even in the playfulness of his invention there was usually a turn of personal malignity, and the real object was not so much to raise a laugh, as to “grin horribly a ghastly smile,” on the individual. It is more than rumoured that he carried his ingenious malignity into the privacies of domestic life; and it is to be regretted that Mr. Nichols, who might have furnished much secret history of this extraordinary literary forger, has, from delicacy, mutilated his collective vigour.

George Steevens usually commenced his operations by opening some pretended discovery in the evening papers, which were then of a more literary cast than they are at present; the St. James’s Chronicle, the General Evening Post, or the Whitehall, were they not dead in body and in spirit, would now bear witness to his successful efforts. The late Mr. Boswell told me, that Steevens frequently wrote notes on Shakspeare, purposely to mislead or entrap Malone, and obtain for himself an easy triumph in the next edition! Steevens loved to assist the credulous in getting up for them some strange new thing, dancing them about with a Will-o’-the-wisp—now alarming them by a shriek of laughter! and now like a grinning Pigwigging sinking them chin-deep into a quagmire! Once he presented them with a fictitious portrait of Shakspeare, and when the brotherhood were sufficiently divided in their opinions, he pounced upon them with a demonstration, that every portrait of Shakspeare partook of the same doubtful authority! Steevens usually assumed a nom de guerre of Collins, a pseudo-commentator, and sometimes of Amner, who was discovered to be an obscure puritanic minister who never read text or notes of a play-wright, whenever he explored into a “thousand notable secrets” with which he has polluted the pages of Shakspeare! The marvellous narrative of the upas-tree of Java, which Darwin adopted in his plan of “enlisting imagination under the banner of science,” appears to have been another forgery which amused our “Puck.” It was first given in the London Magazine, as an extract from a Dutch traveller, but the extract was never discovered in the original author, and “the effluvia of this noxious tree, which through a district of twelve or fourteen miles had killed all vegetation, and had spread the skeletons of men and animals, affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described, or painters delineated,” is perfectly chimerical. A splendid flim-flam! When Dr. Berkenhout was busied in writing, without much knowledge or skill, a history of our English authors, Steevens allowed the good man to insert a choice letter by George Peele, giving an account of a “merry meeting at the Globe,” wherein Shakspeare said Ben Jonson and Ned Alleyne are admirably made to perform their respective parts. As the nature of the “Biographia Literaria” required authorities, Steevens ingeniously added, “Whence I copied this letter I do not recollect.” However, he well knew it came from the “Theatrical Mirror,” where he had first deposited the precious original, to which he had unguardedly ventured to affix the date of 1600; unluckily, Peele was discovered to have died two years before he wrote his own letter! The date is adroitly dropped in Berkenhout! Steevens did not wish to refer to his original, which I have often seen quoted as authority. One of these numerous forgeries of our Puck appears in an article in Isaac Reed’s catalogue, art. 8708. “The Boke of the Soldan, conteyninge strange matters touchynge his lyfe and deathe, and the ways of his course, in two partes, 12mo,” with this marginal note by Reed—“The foregoing was written by George Steevens, Esq., from whom I received it. It was composed merely to impose on ‘a literary friend,’ and had its effect; for he was so far deceived as to its authenticity, that he gave implicit credit to it, and put down the person’s name in whose possession the original books were supposed to be.”

One of the sort of inventions which I attribute to Steevens has been got up with a deal of romantic effect, to embellish the poetical life of Milton; and unquestionably must have sadly perplexed his last matter-of-fact editor, who is not a man to comprehend a flim-flam!—for he has sanctioned the whole fiction, by preserving it in his biographical narrative! The first impulse of Milton to travel in Italy is ascribed to the circumstance of his having been found asleep at the foot of a tree in the vicinity of Cambridge, when two foreign ladies, attracted by the loveliness of the youthful poet, alighted from their carriage, and having admired him for some time as they imagined unperceived, the youngest, who was very beautiful, drew a pencil from her pocket, and having written some lines, put the paper with her trembling hand into his own! But it seems,—for something was to account how the sleeping youth could have been aware of these minute particulars, unless he had been dreaming them,—that the ladies had been observed at a distance by some friends of Milton, and they explained to him the whole silent adventure. Milton on opening the paper read four verses from Guarini, addressed to those “human stars,” his own eyes! On this romantic adventure, Milton set off for Italy, to discover the fair “incognita,” to which undiscovered lady we are told we stand indebted for the most impassioned touches in the Paradise Lost! We know how Milton passed his time in Italy, with Dati, and Gaddi, and Frescobaldi, and other literary friends, amidst its academies, and often busied in book-collecting. Had Milton’s tour in Italy been an adventure of knight-errantry, to discover a lady whom he had never seen, at least he had not the merit of going out of the direct road to Florence and Rome, nor of having once alluded to this Dame de ses pensées, in his letters or inquiries among his friends, who would have thought themselves fortunate to have introduced so poetical an adventure in the numerous canzoni they showered on our youthful poet.

This historiette, scarcely fitted for a novel, first appeared where generally Steevens’s literary amusements were carried on, in the General Evening Post, or the St. James’s Chronicle: and Mr. Todd, in the improved edition of Milton’s Life, obtained this spurious original, where the reader may find it; but the more curious part of the story remains to be told. Mr. Todd proceeds, “The preceding highly-coloured relation, however, is not singular; my friend, Mr. Walker, points out to me a counterpart in the extract from the preface to Poésies de Marguerite-Eleanore Clotilde, depuis Madame de Surville, Poète François du XV. Siècle. Paris, 1803.”

And true enough we find among “the family traditions” of the same Clotilde, that Justine de Levis, great-grandmother of this unknown poetess of the fifteenth century, walking in a forest, witnessed the same beautiful spectacle which the Italian Unknown had at Cambridge; never was such an impression to be effaced, and she could not avoid leaving her tablets by the side of the beautiful sleeper, declaring her passion in her tablets by four Italian verses! The very number our Milton had meted to him! Oh! these four verses! they are as fatal in their number as the date of Peele’s letter proved to George Steevens! Something still escapes in the most ingenious fabrication which serves to decompose the materials. It is well our veracious historian dropped all mention of Guarini—else that would have given that coup de grace—a fatal anachronism! However, his invention supplied him with more originality than the adoption of this story and the four verses would lead us to infer. He tells us how Petrarch was jealous of the genius of his Clotilde’s grandmother, and has even pointed out a sonnet which, “among the traditions of the family,” was addressed to her! He narrates, that the gentleman, when he fairly awoke, and had read the “four verses,” set off for Italy, which he run over till he found Justine, and Justine found him, at a tournament at Modena! This parallel adventure disconcerted our two grave English critics—they find a tale which they wisely judge improbable, and because they discover the tale copied, they conclude that “it is not singular!” This knot of perplexity is, however, easily cut through, if we substitute, which we are fully justified in, for “Poète du XV. Siècle”—“du XIX. Siècle.” The “Poésies” of Clotilde are as genuine a fabrication as Chatterton’s; subject to the same objections, having many ideas and expressions which were unknown in the language at the time they are pretended to have been composed, and exhibiting many imitations of Voltaire and other poets. The present story of the four Italian verses, and the beautiful Sleeper, would be quite sufficient evidence of the authenticity of “the family traditions” of Clotilde, depuis Madame de Surville, and also of Monsieur De Surville himself; a pretended editor, who is said to have found by mere accident the precious manuscript, and while he was copying from the press, in 1793, these pretty poems, for such they are, of his grande tante, was shot in the Reign of Terror, and so completely expired, that no one could ever trace his existence! The real editor, who we must presume to be the poet, published them in 1803.

Such, then, is the history of a literary forgery! A Puck composes a short romantic adventure, which is quietly thrown out to the world in a newspaper or a magazine; some collector, such as the late Mr. Bindley, who procured for Mr. Todd his original, as idle at least as he is curious, houses the forlorn fiction—and it enters into literary history! A French Chatterton picks up the obscure tale, and behold, astonishes the literary inquirers of the very country whence the imposture sprung! But the four Italian verses, and the Sleeping Youth! Oh! Monsieur Vanderbourg! for that gentleman is the ostensible editor of Clotilde’s poesies of the fifteenth century, some ingenious persons are unlucky in this world! Perhaps one day we may yet discover that this “romantic adventure” of Milton and Justine de Levis is not so original as it seems—it may lie hid in the Astrée of D’Urfé, or some of the long romances of the Scuderies, whence the English and the French Chattertons may have drawn it. To such literary inventors we say with Swift:—

Will it be credited that for the enjoyment of a temporary piece of malice, Steevens would even risk his own reputation as a poetical critic? Yet this he ventured, by throwing out of his edition the poems of Shakspeare, with a remarkable hyper-criticism, that “the strongest act of parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.” Not only he denounced the sonnets of Shakspeare, but the sonnet itself, with an absurd question, “What has truth or nature to do with sonnets?” The secret history of this unwarrantable mutilation of a great author by his editor was, as I was informed by the late Mr. Boswell, merely done to spite his rival commentator Malone, who had taken extraordinary pains in their elucidation. Steevens himself had formerly reprinted them, but when Malone from these sonnets claimed for himself one ivy leaf of a commentator’s pride, behold, Steevens in a rage would annihilate even Shakspeare himself, that he might gain a triumph over Malone! In the same spirit, but with more caustic pleasantry, he opened a controversy with Malone respecting Shakspeare’s wife! It seems that the poet had forgotten to mention his wife in his copious will; and his recollection of Mrs. Shakspeare seems to mark the slightness of his regard, for he only introduced by an interlineation, a legacy to her of his “second best bed with the furniture”—and nothing more! Malone naturally inferred that the poet had forgot her, and so recollected her as more strongly to mark how little he esteemed her. He had already, as it is vulgarly expressed, “cut her off, not indeed with a shilling, but with an old bed!”211 All this seems judicious, till Steevens asserts the conjugal affection of the bard, tells us, that the poet having, when in health, provided for her by settlement, or knowing that her father had already done so (circumstances entirely conjectural), he bequeathed to her at his death not merely an old piece of furniture, but, perhaps, as a mark of peculiar tenderness,

Steevens’ severity of satire marked the deep malevolence of his heart; and Murphy has strongly pourtrayed him in his address to the Malevoli.

Such another Puck was Horace Walpole! The King of Prussia’s “Letter” to Rousseau, and “The Memorial” pretended to have been signed by noblemen and gentlemen, were fabrications, as he confesses, only to make mischief. It well became him, whose happier invention, the Castle of Otranto, was brought forward in the guise of forgery, so unfeelingly to have reprobated the innocent inventions of a Chatterton.

We have Pucks busied among our contemporaries: whoever shall discover their history will find it copious though intricate; the malignity at least will exceed tenfold the merriment.

LITERARY FORGERIES.

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 Archæologia!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 morì 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 Æneid 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!

“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 Abbé Costaing has found?

“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 Abbé 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 Abbé 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 Vallière, and the Abbé 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 Vallière’s sale! The history of this volume is curious. The Duke and the Abbé 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 Abbé, 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 Basiliké, 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