There are frequently unsigned poems of a serious character in the _Evening Post_ during these years, but nine in ten are so poor that it is impossible to believe that Bryant wrote them. Now and then occurs one which might be his; such, for example, are the translations of lyrics from the German of Gleim which appeared on Nov. 13, 1827, and Dec. 2, 1828. Bryant did not claim all of his poems in even the _United States Review_; it has been assumed of these, and it may be assumed of any lost in the _Evening Post_ files, that they were not worth claiming. As a young man, Bryant took his journalistic duties light-heartedly, and one of his distinctive contributions lay in his literary hoaxes. He and his close friend Robert C. Sands, a talented young assistant of Col. Stone in editing the _Commercial Advertiser_, delighted in them. “Did you see a learned article in the _Evening Post_ the other day about Pope Alexander VI and Cæsar Borgia?” he wrote Gulian Verplanck, then a Congressman in Washington. “Matt. Patterson undertook to be saucy in the _Commercial_ as to a Latin quotation in it, so we--i. e., Sands and myself--sent him on a fool’s errand.” The editor of the _Commercial_ had corrected the _Evening Post’s_ Latin, and Bryant had replied as follows, inventing the authority he cited: As to the Latin of the phrase, “_Vides, mi fili, quam parva sapientia gubernatur mundus_,” he affirms that it is not good. He says that it should be, “_Vides, mi fili, quantilla sapientia regitur mundus_.” He adds, however, that it was not said by any of the Popes, but by some great statesman, whose name he does not give, probably because he does not know it. As to the correctness of the Latin, that is no business of ours.... If any of the Popes spoke bad Latin, two or three hundred years before we were born, it should be recollected that it was not in our power to help it. As to the fact of the phrase being made use of by one of the Popes, we will only say to the writer in the _Commercial_, that if he will consult the work entitled _Virorum Illustrium Reliquiæ_, collected by the learned Reisch and published at the Hague, by John and Daniel Steucker, in 1650, a work well known to scholars, he will find that the words, as we have quoted them, were addressed by Pope Alexander VI to his son Cæsar Borgia.