some of the most capital connoisseurs of the day, one of whom bought it
as one of the finest engravings of Albert Durer: even Strutt
acknowledges the merit of Goltzius's _masterpieces_!

To these instances of artists I will add others of celebrated authors.
Muretus rendered Joseph Scaliger, a great stickler for the ancients,
highly ridiculous by an artifice which he practised. He sent some verses
which he pretended were copied from an old manuscript. The verses were
excellent, and Scaliger was credulous. After having read them, he
exclaimed they were admirable, and affirmed that they were written by an
old comic poet, Trabeus. He quoted them, in his commentary on Varro _De
Re Rustica_, as one of the most precious fragments of antiquity. It was
then, when he had fixed his foot firmly in the trap, that Muretus
informed the world of the little dependence to be placed on the critical
sagacity of one so prejudiced in favour of the ancients, and who
considered his judgment as infallible.

The Abbe Regnier Desmarais, having written an ode or, as the Italians
call it, canzone, sent it to the Abbe Strozzi at Florence, who used it
to impose on three or four academicians of Della Crusca. He gave out
that Leo Allatius, librarian of the Vatican, in examining carefully the
MSS. of Petrarch preserved there, had found two pages slightly glued,
which having separated, he had discovered this ode. The fact was not at
first easily credited; but afterwards the similarity of style and manner
rendered it highly probable. When Strozzi undeceived the public, it
procured the Abbe Regnier a place in the academy, as an honourable
testimony of his ingenuity.

Pere Commire, when Louis XIV. resolved on the conquest of Holland,
composed a Latin fable, entitled "The Sun and the Frogs," in which he
assumed with such felicity the style and character of Phaedrus, that the
learned Wolfius was deceived, and innocently inserted it in his edition
of that fabulist.

Flaminius Strada would have deceived most of the critics of his age, if
he had given as the remains of antiquity the different pieces of history
and poetry which he composed on the model of the ancients, in his
_Prolusiones Academicae_. To preserve probability he might have given out
that he had drawn them, from some old and neglected library; he had then
only to have added a good commentary, tending to display the conformity
of the style and manner of these fragments with the works of those