The other fraud was connected with this one of the “Leaden Books,” whose authority it was alleged to confirm; but it was much broader and bolder in its claims and character. It consisted of a series of fragments of chronicles, circulated earlier in manuscript, but first printed in 1610, and then represented to have come, in 1594, from the monastery of Fulda, near Worms, to Father Higuera, of Toledo, a Jesuit, and a personal acquaintance of Mariana. They purported, on their face, to have been written by Flavius Lucius Dexter, Marcus Maximus, Heleca, and other primitive Christians, and contained important and wholly new statements touching the early civil and ecclesiastical history of Spain. They were, no doubt, an imitation of the forgeries of John of Viterbo, given to the world about a century before as the works of Berosus and Manetho; but the Spanish forgeries were prepared with more learning and a nicer ingenuity. Flattering fictions were fitted to recognized facts, as if both rested on the same authority; new saints were given to churches that were not well provided in this department of their hagiology; a dignified origin was traced for noble families, that had before been unable to boast of their founders; and a multitude of Christian conquests and achievements were hinted at or recorded, that gratified the pride of the whole nation, the more because they had never till then been heard of. Few doubted what it was so agreeable to all to believe. Sandoval, Tamayo de Vargas, Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado, and, for a time, Nicolas Antonio,--all learned men,--were persuaded that these summaries of chronicles, or _chronicones_, as they were called, were authentic; and if Arias Montano, the editor of the Polyglot, Mariana, the historian, and Antonio Agustin, the cautious and critical friend of Zurita, held an opposite faith, they did not think it worth while openly to avow it. The current of opinion, in fact, ran strongly in favor of the forgeries; and they were generally regarded as true history till about 1650 or a little later, and therefore till long after the death of their real author, Father Higuera, which happened in 1624. The discussion about them, however, which, it is evident, was going quietly on during much of this time, was useful. Doubts were multiplied; the disbelief in their genuineness, which had been expressed to Higuera himself, as early as 1595, by the modest and learned Juan Bautista Perez, Bishop of Segorbe, gradually gained ground; writers of history grew cautious; and at last, in 1652, Nicolas Antonio began his “Historias _Fabulosas_”; a huge folio, which he left unfinished at his death, and which was not printed till long afterwards, but which, with its cumbrous, though clear-sighted learning, left no doubt as to the nature and extent of the fraud of Father Higuera, and made his case a teaching to all future