frontery, by way of specimen, to edit an
Italian translation of the sixtieth book, but that book took up no more
than one octavo page! A professor of Oriental literature in Prussia
introduced it in his work, never suspecting the fraud; it proved to be
nothing more than the epitome of Florus. He also gave out that he
possessed a code which he had picked up in the abbey of St. Martin,
containing the ancient history of Sicily in the Arabic period,
comprehending above two hundred years; and of which ages their own
historians were entirely deficient in knowledge. Vella declared he had a
genuine official correspondence between the Arabian governors of Sicily
and their superiors in Africa, from the first landing of the Arabians in
that island. Vella was now loaded with honours and pensions! It is true
he showed Arabic MSS., which, however, did not contain a syllable of
what he said. He pretended he was in continual correspondence with
friends at Morocco and elsewhere. The King of Naples furnished him with
money to assist his researches. Four volumes in quarto were at length
published! Vella had the adroitness to change the Arabic MSS. he
possessed, which entirely related to Mahomet, to matters relative to
Sicily; he bestowed several weeks' labour to disfigure the whole,
altering page for page, line for line, and word for word, but
interspersed numberless dots, strokes, and flourishes; so that when he
published a fac-simile, every one admired the learning of Vella, who
could translate what no one else could read. He complained he had lost
an eye in this minute labour; and every one thought his pension ought to
have been increased. Everything prospered about him, except his eye,
which some thought was not so bad neither. It was at length discovered
by his blunders, &c., that the whole was a forgery: though it had now
been patronised, translated, and extracted through Europe. When this MS.
was examined by an Orientalist, it was discovered to be nothing but a
history of _Mahomet and his family_. Vella was condemned to
imprisonment.

The Spanish antiquary, Medina Conde, in order to favour the pretensions
of the church in a great lawsuit, forged deeds and inscriptions, which
he buried in the ground, where he knew they would shortly be dug up.
Upon their being found, he published engravings of them, and gave
explanations of their unknown characters, making them out to be so many
authentic proofs and evidences of the contested assumpt