the "Eikon Basilike," is mainly to be attributed the popular estimate of Charles I., and the Royalist reaction, which led to the restoration of the Stuarts. Forgeries as unscrupulous were important factors in the destruction of Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, and Marie Antoinette.

If we turn to literature, the work of the forger meets us at every step, from antiquity downwards. In Greek literature, that functionary has obliged us with the correspondence, or, at least, a portion of the correspondence of Phalaris, of Democritus, Heraclitus, Diogenes, with several letters of Euripides, of Plato, and of Aristotle, and with a whole collection of lyrics -to do them justice, very charming ones ascribed to Anacreon. The Greeks were never remarkable for their honesty, and the more they degenerated, the more dishonest they became, till, in the first and second century A.D., they and the nations who had got mingled with them settled down to forgery on so wholesale a scale that there is scarcely any Greek classic without spurious parasites. Roman literature is even more perplexed by these nefarious practices, extending, as they have done, through nearly nineteen hundred years. But it was not till the Renaissance that they became interesting, and singularly interesting, for they are occasionally miracles of ingenuity. Such would be the "Consolatio," first published in 1583 as a treatise of Cicero, and doing no discredit to its reputed author, but undoubtedly the work of Carlo Sigonio, a distinguished scholar of the sixteenth century; such would be the Trau fragment of the "Satyricon" of Petronius Arbiter, the famous description of Trimalchion's Feast, discovered in a library in Dalmatia by Marinus Statileus, a young lawyer, which occasioned one of the most interesting of the many interesting literary contro

versies of the sixteenth century, and around which still hangs mystery. The skill with which it is executed its enhanced by contrasting it with two other Petronian forgeries, that by Nodot of a complete text of the "Satyricon" in 1690, and that by Lallemand of another fragment of it in 1800. But nowhere has forgery been more active than in theology. Such would be the writings attributed to Dionysius, "The Areopagite," as impudent a fraud as the fictions which go under the name of "Hermes Trismegistus," the "Sibylline Oracles," and the "Correspondence of St. Paul and Seneca."

But to turn to modern literature. From two bare-faced forgeries, probably of the fourth century, the "De Excidio Troja," ascribed to Dares Phrygius, and the "De Bello Trojano,' asscribed to Dictys, the Cretan, descended the voluminous dynasty of Romances, which culminated in the "Filastrato" of Boccaccio, the "Troilus and Cressida" of Chaucer, and the tragicomedy, with the same title, by Shakespeare. From a forgery as impudent-the "Chronicle of the Psuedo Turpin," produced about the beginning of the twelfth century, by a Canon of Barcelona, emanated the still more famous cycle which flowered into the "Chanson de Roland." Equally fraudulent was the work "The History of the Britons," by Geoffrey, of Monmouth, which laid the foundations of the Arthurian romances, and gave us the noble legends consecrated by Spenser, by Shakespeare, by Milton, by Tennyson, which furnished our poetry, in fact, with material as rich and splendid as that out of which Virgil wove the "Eneid." No one can doubt, any more than Geoffrey's contemporaries did, that the "ancient Cymric manuscript," of which it purports to be a translation, was as fictitious as its alleged discoverer.

In the Middle Ages, no work was

more influential than a forgery so palpable that the wonder is that it should have deceived any one who glanced at it, the "Secretum Secretorum,' ascribed to Aristotle, and yet Roger Bacon treated it as genuine, and Gower versified it. The delightful "Travels of Sir John Mandeville," until lately regarded as the genuine records of a real person, were simply an ingenious concoction by two Frenchmen at Liège, and are, together with their hero, as purely fictitious as "Gulliver's Travels" or "The Adventures of Peter Wilkins."

Turn where we will in our literature, fraud and forgery meet us at every step. Of the two works which were most influential in furthering the Romantic Revival, namely, Percy's "Relics" and Macpherson's "Ossian," to neither of which does Mr. Farrer so much as refer, one was full of faked and pseudo matter, and the other was almost unalloyed forgery. About Macpherson's "Ossian" still hangs no little mystery. That three-fourths of it are admittedly pure fabrication is certain. How then did there get into it the undoubtedly genuine vein of poetry which is to be found in it?"the residue," as Matthew Arnold calls it, "with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it," the real grandeur of such a passage as the Address to the Sun. Macpherson, as his acknowledged writings show, had not a grain of poetry in him, nor has his coadjutor, Lachlan Macpherson, left anything to indicate that he was equal to the production of such passages.

Common at all periods, the golden era of this nefarious activity was the eighteenth century. Of some of its exploits, such as George Psalinanazar's "History of Formosa," Bertram's "Description of Britain," and the creation of three British historians, as fictitious as the facts for which they were the authorities, a fraud which

deceived and misled even Gibbon, and was not exposed until long after Bertram's death; Chatterton's "Rowley Forgeries," the infamous forgeries of Lauder, and the ridiculous forgeries of Ireland, of all these Mr. Farrer gives us very interesting accounts. It was, no doubt, only possible for him, in the space at his disposal, to skirt the subject; but it is surprising to find him silent about feats of this kind, of greater interest than those which he has recorded. Such would be the extraordinary forgeries, and the still more extraordinary career, of the Abbé Fourment, who, in 1728, traversed Greece and the Peloponnese for the purpose of copying ancient Greek inscriptions, and who so perplexed with palpable forgery the undoubtedly genuine inscriptions which he brought back, that, nearly a century afterwards, he nearly drove Augustus Boeckh frantic. Still more remarkable were the forgeries of the Abbé Vella. This indefatigable impostor, who was a Maltese chaplain, and well acquainted with Arabic, heard that a Sicilian gentleman, engaged in a history of Sicily, wanted documents throwing light on the history of Sicily during the Middle Ages, trading on the general ignorance of Arabic, produced a manuscript purporting to contain the "Diplomatic Code," or correspondence between the Arabian governor of Sicily and the sovereign of Africa, which was published in two volumes, the first appearing in 1789, and the second in 1792. This was followed in 1793 by "The Book of the Council of Egypt," printed at the expense of the King of Naples, in Bodoni's types, at enormous cost. He then announced that he had discovered an Arabic version of the last books of Livy. These works he had produced by the simple process of disfiguring and faking Arabic manuscripts dealing with entirely different subjects, and having no connection at

all with what he described them as treating of. The history of these extraordinary forgeries well deserves to be written. Curiously parallel to the Chatterton forgeries are the Poësies de Marguerite Eléonore, Clotilde de Valon-Chalys depuis Madame de Surville, poète Francais du XVe Siecle," published in 1803, under the auspices of M. Charles Vanderbourgh, the real author of which was the Marquis Joseph Etienne de Surville, a graceless profligate, who afterwards took to robbing diligences, and was shot in the Velay in 1798. Of the spuriousness of these poems there can be as little doubt as of their great merit.

One of the most impudent forgeries attempted in the last century was that of the "Memoirs of Cagliostro," concocted by the Comte de Courchamps, mainly out of two novels by John Potocki, a Polish Count, published respectively in 1813 and 1814. The fraud was exposed before the work, which was published in instalments, was completed, when De Courchamps had the face to assert that Potocki's publisher had surreptitiously got possession of his manuscripts. Unluckily, however, for De Courchamps, it was shown that one of Potocki's novels had been published at St. Petersburg, under another title, as far back as 1804, and this mean double fraud was triumphantly exposed. Perhaps the most mysterious forgery of modern times was that attributed by many to Payne Collier, the eminent Shakespearean scholar. In a Third Folio of Shakespeare, which belonged to him, The Nation.

and had belonged to him for many years, he announced that he had discovered an enormous number of emendations-roughly, they amounted to about 20,000-in a handwriting of the seventeenth century. That a large proportion of these were forged, there can be no doubt, ink, pencil-marks, and other peculiarities, showing this conclusively. The labor involved in such a work is obvious, and what motive could have prompted the forger, if the forger was Collier, to assign to a phantom the credit of emendations, many of which place the corrector in the first rank of conjectural critics? As, however, there can be no doubt that on other occasions he forged and faked many documents, it is probable that he was the culprit.

Here I must break off; but one word let me add-for it is to the credit of a great scholar-to Mr. Farrer's interesting account of the Simonides forgeries. That arch-impostor had brought some of his manuscriptswhich I do not know, to "Bodley" Cox. "And what date," said the expectant huckster, who had just taken in Sir Frederick Madden, "should you assign to this?" placing a manuscript before him. Cox, after scrutinizing it for a few minutes, curtly replied, "About the middle of the nineteenth century. Pack up and begone, sir!"

It is to be hoped that Mr. Farrer's pleasantly written and scholarly volume will be followed by another of equal interest, for material is indeed ample.

J. Churton Collins.

It is always a convenience to be able to mark an epoch in some distinctive way, to tick it off decisively before putting it away in the pigeon-holes of memory. If an epoch can be expressed by a good round number, so much the better, because so much the easier to remember. Even in the most familiar subjects-in thinking of our own epoch, for example it is useful, as it were, to take stock occasionally. What is a more familiar feature in our own time than that complement and counterpart of industrialism, the continuous acceleration of the means of transport? Yet no intelligent person, who exclaims once a week at his breakfast-table that ships are becoming very large and the world very small, need be ashamed at not being able to say exactly what increase of speed along the great routes of the world has been achieved in a generation.

Many of us marked an epoch for ourselves when Jules Verne wrote "Round the World in Eighty Days." Perhaps it was not possible then to go round in eighty days; the book would have been less exciting to children if it had been possible. But at all events it was nearly possible, and many of us marked down the epoch. Eighty days seemed to convey to us in more or less intelligible terms the size of the world. How many people could say offhand to-day, however, to what those eighty days have been reduced? A writer in the Daily Mail, Mr. F. A. McKenzie, tells us that the journey can now be done in forty days, and that in comfortable trains and ships, not by the desperate expedients of Jules Verne. Possibly we ought to have known all about this, but, frankly, it had not occurred to us to think of it. Now that it has been

brought to our notice, we recognize its significance. "Forty days" marks an epoch.

Let

We do not recommend rushing round the world in forty days. Yet it is interesting to know that it can be done, and in the case of a busy man who cannot possibly get away for more than six weeks there is something to be said for it. The swift panoramic view is often a wonderfully impressive and vivifying one. It teaches no details, but it leaves a broad and sure impression upon which memory works afterwards, as the etcher works upon his plate. To the newspaper-reader distant parts of the earth can be little more than names, and the chief actors upon those stages little more than shadows, till he has seen them. him once see them, if only for a few hours, and the picture rises before his vision every time he reads of them for the rest of his life. He fits the facts into the frame. They are radiant with color. He has perhaps spent a morning in Washington, and when he reads of a difference of opinion between Mr. Roosevelt and the Senate he sees the Senators thronging in excitement about the Capitol, and the coming and going of officials at White House. He may only have stayed a few hours at Colombo, but when he reads of the bursting of the monsoon he knows what it means to agricultural India; he sees again the trailing black clouds, and the mist and the waves scattered in towering spray as they strike the break water. He may only have driven rapidly round Melbourne and Sydney, but he cannot read of Mr. Deakin or Mr. Reid without putting him in his true setting and finding that he has a new interest for him, or without beholding in his

mind's eye Melbourne formal and rectangular, and Sydney, crooked and winding, perched on the shore above her majestic harbor. He may have spent as short a time in Cape Town, but he will always keep the memory of Table Mountain lifted like an altar to the gods under the sky, and he will have learned an instant lesson of geological formation. He may never have left the train for thirteen days when travelling from Moscow to Vladivostok, but he will have had an epitome of racial differences and agricultural pursuits presented to him in the peasants who thronged the stations where the train stopped. The headlong "looping" of the world, then, need not be laughed out of countenance. It is only quite ridiculous in the Pagetts who claim special knowledge acquired by cursory examination. No one who has merely rushed, however, has developed any of the virtues of travel; his motives were not exploratory; he should almost refrain from speaking of his experiences; he has simply allowed himself to be conveyed round so that he might have a map always in his head, a bird's-eye view of the world for his guidance and inspiration. At most, in the words of "Locksley Hall," he "saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be." To say even as much as this is, we know, a very un-Ruskinian sentiment. "Your railroad," said Ruskin, "when you come to understand it, is only a device for making the world smaller." And again: "Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all . . . It is very little different from becoming a parcel." Ruskin did not try to perceive the romance of machinery. He said it was an absurd mixture of motives to attempt to decorate such an abominable necessity as a railway station. He did not ask himself why a railway bridge (say a set of over twenty spans sweeping

But how is the forty days' journey done? We are told that the tickets cost only about £65 second-class, and £123 first-class. The journey is reckoned in this way: London to Moscow, two and a half days; Moscow to Vladivostok, thirteen days; Vladivostok to Yokohama, two days; Yokohama to London viâ Vancouver, twenty-one and a half days; connections, one day. The Russians understand the art of comfortable railway travelling; their carriages and buffets are models. Every long-distance traveller will confirm Mr. McKenzie's statement that a week or so in a train is not wearisome. This is a curious fact, as in England most of us find a few hours in a train terribly tedious. The explanation must be wholly psychological. In England we made up our minds a little prematurely that space had been annihilated by modern invention, and when we are faced with the need, which somehow perversely lingers on, of spending seven or eight hours in a train between London and Edinburgh, we are provoked to the point of resentment. An unscheduled delay of ten minutes for no explained reason figures in our minds as something like a monstrous attack upon the liberty of the subject. Really we enter upon an English journey in the wrong frame of mind. For a journey of several days the frame of mind is quite different; unconsciously we assure ourselves that it would be ridiculous to be in a hurry; the long-distance train is a kind of travelling hotel, and we do not demand great speed of it; the journey is a rest-cure. Meals break in upon the day; one can sit outside on a platform, and fancy one