The Abbé Bizot, the author of the medallic history of Holland, fell into a droll mistake. There is a medal, struck when Philip II. set forth his invincible Armada, on which are represented the King of Spain, the Emperor, the Pope, Electors, Cardinals, &c., with their eyes covered with a bandage, and bearing for inscription this fine verse of Lucretius:—
O cæcas hominum menteis! O pectora cæca!
The Abbé, prepossessed with the prejudice that a nation persecuted by the Pope and his adherents could not represent them without some insult, did not examine with sufficient care the ends of the bandages which covered the eyes and waved about the heads of the personages represented on this medal: he rashly took them for asses' ears, and as such they are engraved!
Mabillon has preserved a curious literary blunder of some pious Spaniards, who applied to the Pope for consecrating a day in honour of Saint Viar. His holiness, in the voluminous catalogue of his saints, was ignorant of this one. The only proof brought forward for his existence was this inscription:—
S. VIAR.
An antiquary, however, hindered one more festival in the Catholic calendar, by convincing them that these letters were only the remains of an inscription erected for an ancient surveyor of the roads; and he read their saintship thus:—
PRÆFECTUS VIARum.
Maffei, in his comparison between Medals and Inscriptions, detects a literary blunder in Spon, who, meeting with this inscription,
Maximo VI Consule
takes the letters VI for numerals, which occasions a strange anachronism. They are only contractions of Viro Illustri—V I.
As absurd a blunder was this of Dr. Stukeley on the coins of Carausius; finding a battered one with a defaced inscription of
FORTVNA AVG.
he read it
ORIVNA AVG.
And sagaciously interpreting this to be the wife of Carausius, makes a new personage start up in history; he contrives even to give some theoretical Memoirs of the August Oriuna.[92]
Father Sirmond was of opinion that St. Ursula and her eleven thousand Virgins were all created out of a blunder. In some ancient MS. they found St. Ursula et Undecimilla V. M. meaning St. Ursula and Undecimilla, Virgin Martyrs; imagining that Undecimilla with the V. and M. which followed, was an abbreviation for Undecem Millia Martyrum Virginum, they made out of Two Virgins the whole Eleven Thousand!
Pope, in a note on Measure for Measure, informs us, that its story was taken from Cinthio's Novels, Dec. 8. Nov. 5. That is, Decade 8, Novel 5. The critical Warburton, in his edition of Shakspeare, puts the words in full length thus, December 8, November 5.