te
them followed the aerial 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 Bibliotheque 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 ef