n are
generally of a substantial character, and amply repay the misapplied
effort and ingenuity demanded.

The success which has attended too many of these frauds may be largely
accounted for by the fact that in many cases the enthusiasm of the
collector has outrun his caution.

Many a man famous for his astuteness in the pursuit of his ordinary
business has allowed himself to fall an easy victim to the forger, thus
exemplifying the familiar adage that we are easily persuaded to believe
what we want to believe.

The recorded stories of some of the frauds perpetrated upon ardent and
presumably judicious collectors read like the tales told so often of the
triumph of the confidence trickster, and one marvels how a person of
ordinary power of observation, to say nothing of experience, could fall
a victim to a fraud requiring little perception to detect. The
explanation doubtless lies in the direction indicated--the ardour of the
pursuit, the pride and joy of possessing something that is absolutely
unique.

The leading case--to use an expressive legal term--is that known as the
Vrain-Lucas fraud, the principal victim of which was Mons. Chasles,
probably the greatest of modern French geometricians, and one of the few
foreign savants entitled to append the distinguishing mark of a F.R.S.
of England.

Lucas was a half-educated frequenter, and nominal reading student of the
great Parisian library, and for some years had dealt in autographs in a
small way, the specimens he offered being undoubtedly genuine. Inspired
by the collecting ardour and the apparent blind faith placed in him by
M. Chasles, Lucas embarked upon a series of deceptions so impudent, that
it is easy to sympathise with the defence put forward by his advocate at
the trial, namely, that the fraud was so transparent that it could only
be regarded as a freak.

In the period between the years 1861 and 1869, Lucas sold to his dupe
the enormous number of 27,000 documents, every one a glaring fraud. They
comprised letters purporting to have been written by such improbable
authors as Abelard, Alcibiades, Alexander the Great to Aristotle,
Cicero, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Sappho, Anacreon, Pliny, Plutarch, St.
Jerome, Diocletian, Juvenal, Socrates, Pompey, and--most stupendous joke
of all--Lazarus after his resurrection.

It is hard to believe, and but for the irrefutable records of the Court,
few would credit the fact that every one of these letters was in the
Fr