Worcester.
LITERARY FRAUDS OF MODERN TIMES.
(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
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.
P. C. S. S.