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 {140} 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. * * * * * SIR H. WOTTON'S LETTER TO MILTON. (Vol. vi., p. 5.; Vol. vii., pp. 7. 111.) I am obliged to apologise for having made Sir Henry Wotton use the words "some long time before," instead of "some good while before," and therefore take the opportunity of saying that I think Sir Henry's allusion to "the art of stationers," in binding a good and a bad book up together, almost proves "our common friend Mr. R." to have been a bookseller. Notwithstanding the very high authorities against me, I will then venture to insinuate, that instead of John Rouse, or Robert Randolph, plain Humphrey _Robinson_ is meant, by whom _Comus_ was printed in 1637, "at the signe of the Three Pidgeons, in Paul's Church-yard."